Laudator Temporis Acti

Barthold Georg Niebuhr, letter to Madame Hensler (September 6, 1797, tr. Susanna Winkworth):

The lot of the scholar working amidst his books is a wearisome one. He is ever treading on the brink of pedantry, a yawning chasm, in which, if we were laughing on the subject, we might say he would be buried in dust and dead leaves, if he made a false step. He has to extract honey from wormwood. He must constantly keep his mind on the stretch; can only succeed by slow degrees in his task of self-culture, and measures every thing by an ideal standard, which he is often unable to attain from the poverty of his materials—still oftener from his own want of talent.

Sciences which are entirely based on speculation, such as philosophy and mathematics, are free from this disadvantage; and all occupation with them refreshes and quickens the mental powers, when one has fairly got into their spirit. Neither are those liable to get depressed by their studies, who collect and compare, often without the least philosophy, single interesting things, such as natural objects.

But he who studies grammar, and rhetoric, and style, seeks and deduces rules and laws, or learns those that others have found, which are indeed important to him as regards the refinement of his taste, and perhaps something higher, but which are so dry—taken singly, for the most part so unimportant—must constantly stimulate his ardor, and keep his affections in play, or he will be in danger of either relaxing his exertions, or acquiring a mechanical pleasure in mere words. In the study of history there is a much higher species of interest. But its immense extent, the difficulty of imprinting all that is needful on the memory, the almost greater difficulty of steadily maintaining a correct point of view, the toil of collecting the most interesting fragments from innumerable books and relics, while conscious of their incompleteness, the repulsive task of wading through an immense amount of what is bad (though in this respect people generally of their own free will do more than is necessary), until at last you have so far reduced all to order, that you can begin to mould the mass into a beautiful form (which it takes years to do)—these preparatory difficulties almost overpower any one who perceives them.