I can recollect them, were often shrewd;
the suggestions ingenious; the judgments not seldom acute. I feel myself
the same individual all through.

Sometimes I was unreasonably presumptuous, and sometimes unnecessarily
distrustful. Experience has taught me in various instances a sober
confidence in my decisions; but that is all the difference. So to
express it, I had then the same tools to work with as now; but the
magazine of materials upon which I had to operate was scantily supplied.
Like the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the faculty, such as it was,
was within me; but my shelves contained but a small amount of furniture:

A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses,
Which, thinly scattered, served to make a shew.

In speaking thus of the intellectual powers of my youth, I am however
conceding too much. It is true, "Practice maketh perfect." But it is
surprising, in apt and towardly youth, how much there is to commend in
the first essays. The novice, who has his faculties lively and on the
alert, will strike with his hammer almost exactly where the blow ought
to be placed, and give nearly the precisely right force to the act. He
will seize the thread it was fitting to seize; and, though he fail again
and again, will shew an adroitness upon the whole that we scarcely know
how to account for. The man whose career shall ultimately be crowned
with success, will demonstrate in the beginning that he was destined to
succeed.

There is therefore no radical difference between the child and the man.
His flesh becomes more firm and sinewy; his bones grow more solid
and powerful; his joints are more completely strung. But he is still
essentially the same being that he was. When a genuine philosopher holds
a new-born child in his arms, and carefully examines it, he perceives
in it various indications of temper and seeds of character. It was all
there, though folded up and confused, and not obtruding itself upon the
remark of every careless spectator. It continues with the child through
life, grows with his growth, and never leaves him till he is at last
consigned to the tomb. How absurd then by artful rules and positive
institutions to undertake to separate what can never be divided! The
child is occasionally grave and reflecting, and deduces well-founded
inferences; he draws on the past, and plunges into the wide ocean of
the future. In proportion as the child adva