has made for the education of the heart,
an arrangement which it seems the object of the present age to
counteract instead of to cherish and confirm. I imagined the happy
delight of the father in seeing his child at a distance, and watching
her as she approached to perform her errand of love. I imagined the joy
of the mother in seeing her return. I am strongly of opinion (an opinion
you, perhaps, have seen expressed by me in a letter to Mr. Rose[263])
that this is the discipline which is more calculated by a thousand
degrees to make a virtuous and happy nation than the all-engrossing,
estranging, eleemosynary institutions for education, which perhaps
communicate more _knowledge_. In these institutions what the pupils gain
in _knowledge_ they often lose in _wisdom_. This is a distinction which
must never be lost sight of.

[263] See vol. i. pp. 340-8. G.

Education should never be wholly eleemosynary. But must the parent
suffer privations for the sake of the child? Yes; for these privations
endear the child to the parent, and the parent to the child; and
whatever education the parent may thus gain or lose for his child, he
has thus gained the noblest result of the most liberal education for
himself--the habit of self-denial.

Next to your principles, and affections, and health, value your
time.[264]

[264] _Memoirs_, ii. pp. 467-80.

* * * * *

(_f_) REMINISCENCES OF THE REV. R.P. GRAVES, M.A., FORMERLY OF
WINDERMERE, NOW OF DUBLIN.

I remember Mr. Wordsworth saying that, at a particular stage of his
mental progress, he used to be frequently so rapt into an unreal
transcendental world of ideas that the external world seemed no longer
to exist in relation to him, and he had to reconvince himself of its
existence _by clasping a tree_, or something that happened to be near
him. I could not help connecting this fact with that obscure passage in
his great Ode on the 'Intimations of Immortality,' in which he speaks of

'Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things;
Fallings from us, vanishings:
Blank misgivings of a creature,
Moving about in worlds not realised,' &c.

I heard him once make the remark that it would be a good habit to watch
closely the first involuntary thoughts upon waking in the morning, as
indications of the real current of the moral being.

I was struck by what seemed to me a beautiful analogy, which I once
heard