, "Mamma, I say, what did God make the world of?" and several,
who did not venture on speech, have had an idea of some one gray
primitive thing, felt a difficulty as to how the red came, and wondered
that marble could _ever_ have been the same as moonshine. This is in
truth the picture of life. We begin with the infinite and eternal, which
we shall never apprehend; and these form a framework, a schedule, a set
of co-ordinates to which we refer all which we learn later. At first,
like the old Greek, "We look up to the whole sky, and are lost in the
one and the all;" in the end we classify and enumerate, learn each star,
calculate distances, draw cramped diagrams on the unbounded sky, write a
paper on a Cygni and a treatise on e Draconis, map special facts upon
the indefinite void, and engrave precise details on the infinite and
everlasting. So in history: somehow the whole comes in boyhood, the
details later and in manhood. The wonderful series, going far back to
the times of old patriarchs with their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed
Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid
Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless shifting
of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical civilization, its
fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of
ourselves and home,--when did we learn these? Not yesterday nor to-day:
but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original flow of
fancy. What we learn afterwards are but the accurate littlenesses of the
great topic, the dates and tedious facts. Those who begin late learn
only these; but the happy first feel the mystic associations and the
progress of the whole.

However exalted may seem the praises which we have given to loose and
unplanned reading, we are not saying that it is the sole ingredient of a
good education. Besides this sort of education, which some boys will
voluntarily and naturally give themselves, there needs, of course,
another and more rigorous kind, which must be impressed upon them from
without. The terrible difficulty of early life--the _use_ of pastors and
masters really is, that they compel boys to a distinct mastery of that
which they do not wish to learn. There is nothing to be said for a
preceptor who is not dry. Mr. Carlyle describes, with bitter satire, the
fate of one of his heroes who was obliged to acquire whole systems of
information in which he, the hero, saw no use, and which