Schools and leisure and wealth are useful, but
they are not indispensable either to felicity or to honor. Bunyan
lacked them all; and yet in the absence of them achieved greatness
--and what is far better, wide and enduring usefulness. No man, with
God's exhaustless Scriptures in his hands, and with the rich book of
nature and providence open in its pictured radiance before his eyes,
needs to have either a dwindling or an impoverished soul. Of that
latter volume, the works of God, as of that former, the word of God,
Bunyan was evidently a delighted and unwearied student. His
references to birds and insects, flowers and running brooks and
evening clouds, and forests and mountains, all show a man whose
nature was genially awake to the harmony and beauty of the material
world that lay in order and splendor around him. It was, in Bunyan,
no mere mimicry caught from books and companions--the echo of any
fashion of his times. He writes of what he had seen with his own
eyes; and seems to avoid aiming at aught beyond that. Hence to the
ocean, which probably he never thus saw--and which had he beheld it
in its placid vastness, or in its stormy wrath, he could not well
have forgotten--his writings contain, as far as we remember, no
allusions, in all the varied and exuberant imagery which they
employ.
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