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Show Whence Came This Skill? There is only one answer "He musta learned himself." Nothing else accounts for it. A tall, ungainly, loosely knit boy trudged miles to borrow a book, and in a log cabin lay hefore a pine knot fire and reod; then ('t is said) he practiced words on a shingle with charcoal as pencil, trying his best to use the words he'd learned; years and years later, through the fiery furnace of failure after failure, of sorrow, care and thought, came the famous fa-mous Gettysburg Address, and that more famous letter to Mrs. Bixby "mother of five sons who died gloriously in battle. I feel how week and fruitless . . . . beguile . . . grief of a loss to overwhelming. But I cannot refrain. ..thanks of the republic ... I pray . . . assuage the anguish. . . cherished memory . . altar al-tar of freedom." Whence came such lucid thoughts? Such balanced, bal-anced, even, forceful, and such fitting choice of the exact words to convey meaning? And such a high plane. Thought perfectly formed before expression was begun; then the flow that cannot be improved. Both famous writings are models of correctness;; have been quoted uncounted times; have been declaimed de-claimed upon every rostrum; and got from the soft glow of a pine knot fire in a log cabin! "He musta learned himself." Another boy held the horses of Meludds before the Globe Theatre in old London, and got his thrup-pence thrup-pence fee. Inside the musty place, he foraged royally roy-ally among the ancient, time-worn manuscripts of plays (anybody's property) and his for the reading. Later he was fined for poaching on a deer preserve. There must be some special virtue in dog-eared stage copies of lines, holding bridles of nags, and poaching deer for that boy grown produced such thoughts as "There's a divinity shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may," and "The readiness is all." The range of human emotions, the gamut of ambition; courts, kings, laymen, rogues; the tenderness tender-ness of lovers he struck the richest chord in all fields, and left us Shakesepeare's works. "He musta learned himself" or Bacon wrote 'em. A little tinkerer, mending pots and pans, pushing push-ing his tiny cart along the back byways of the coun-side, coun-side, had a theme buzzing in his brain and we inherit in-herit "Pilgrim's Progress. John Bunyan must have got inspiration from soldering a leak in a saucepan for no other means accounts for it, unless "He musta learned himself." Yet it is taught, even in collegs, "where stones are polished and diamonds dulled, for a rich patrician, patri-cian, a gownsman, discoursed among plane trees, and on a wax tablet wrote "Dialogs" which have lasted 2500 years, recopied lovingly by monks during dur-ing each generation. Rich in imagery, meaty with the heaviest thoughts, poets, statesmen and philosophers philos-ophers have delved in this rich mine of Plato and taken what nuggets they found, making them their own more or less, ever borrowing from the great master. Yes,, it can be taught (though it seldom is); but even so, at that early day so few were the trailmak-ers, trailmak-ers, that largely we must say "He musta learned himself." What is this thing the power of choice words the lucidity of thought faultless expression, beauty beau-ty of language? Is it got the hard way, laboriously dug out, studied, rubbed into form with much mull-ling mull-ling of thought before released? Or, is it a gift from the Muses presiding over the printed page? Its heritage her-itage shows all walks of life; the lowly have it, the rich partake of it; but howsoever got, the question still arises unsolved, "Whence came this skill?" |