ea unknown to him. He would have
been ready to read about Egypt, about Spain, about coals in Borneo, the
teak-wood in India, the current in the River Mississippi, on natural
history or human history, on theology or morals, on the state of the
Dark Ages or the state of the Light Ages, on Augustulus or Lord Chatham,
on the first century or the seventeenth, on the moon, the millennium, or
the whole duty of man. Just then, reading is an end in itself. At that
time of life you no more think of a future consequence--of the remote,
the very remote possibility of deriving knowledge from the perusal of a
book, than you expect so great a result from spinning a peg-top. You
spin the top, and you read the book; and these scenes of life are
exhausted. In such studies, of all prose, perhaps the best is history:
one page is so like another, battle No. 1 is so much on a par with
battle No. 2. Truth may be, as they say, stranger than fiction,
abstractedly; but in actual books, novels are certainly odder and more
astounding than correct history.

It will be said, What is the use of this? why not leave the reading of
great books till a great age? why plague and perplex childhood with
complex facts remote from its experience and inapprehensible by its
imagination? The reply is, that though in all great and combined facts
there is much which childhood cannot thoroughly imagine, there is also
in very many a great deal which can only be truly apprehended for the
first time at that age. Youth has a principle of consolidation; we begin
with the whole. Small sciences are the labors of our manhood; but the
round universe is the plaything of the boy. His fresh mind shoots out
vaguely and crudely into the infinite and eternal. Nothing is hid from
the depth of it; there are no boundaries to its vague and wandering
vision. Early science, it has been said, begins in utter nonsense; it
would be truer to say that it starts with boyish fancies. How absurd
seem the notions of the first Greeks! Who could believe now that air or
water was the principle, the pervading substance, the eternal material
of all things? Such affairs will never explain a thick rock. And what a
white original for a green and sky-blue world! Yet people disputed in
these ages not whether it was either of those substances, but which of
them it was. And doubtless there was a great deal, at least in quantity,
to be said on both sides. Boys are improved; but some in our own day
have asked