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Nugent, Homer Heath

"A Book of Exposition"

The very
idiots at our public institutions imitate each other's peculiarities.
And, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own
person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread from
you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is dropped
into a lake.
Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even now in New
York they have formed a society for the improvement of our national
vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of
various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with
the awful thing that it is. And, better still than that, because more
radical and general, is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it,
preached by Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admirable little
volume called _Power Through Repose_, a book that ought to be in the
hands of every teacher and student in America of either sex. You need
only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others. But of
one thing be confident: others still will follow you.


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