the embodiment of the truth and beauty which they see and love.

The overmastering love of mental exercise, of the good of the intellect, is probably never found in formal and prosaic minds; or if so, its first awakening is in the early years when to think is to feel, when the soul, fresh from God, comes trailing clouds of glory, and the sun and moon and stars, and the hills and flowing waters seem but made to crown with joy hearts that love. It is in these dewy dawns that the image of beauty is imprinted on the soul and the sense of mystery awakens. We move about and become a part of all we see, grow akin to stones and leaves and birds, and to all young and happy things. We lose ourselves in life which is poured round us like an unending sea; are natural, healthful, alive to all we see and touch; have no misgivings, but walk as though the eternal God held us by the hand. These are the fair spring days when we suck honey that shall nourish us in the winters of which we do not dream; when sunsets interfuse themselves with all our being until we are dyed in the many-tinted glory; when the miracle of the changing year is the soul's fair seed-time; when lying in the grass, the head resting in clasped hands, while soft white clouds float lazily through azure skies, and the birds warble, and the waters murmur, and the flowers breathe fragrance, we feel a kind of unconscious consciousness of a universal life in Nature. The very rocks seem to be listening to what the leaves whisper; and through the silent eternities we almost see the dead becoming the living, the living the dead, until both grow to be one, and whatever is, is life.

He who has never had these visions; has never heard these airy voices; has never seemed about to catch a glimpse of the inner heart of being, pulsing beneath the veil of visible things; has never felt that he himself is a spirit looking blindly on a universe, which if his eyes could but see and his ears hear, would be revealed as the very heaven of the infinite God,—must forever lack something of the freshness, of the eager delight, with which a poetic mind contemplates the world and follows whither the divine intimations point. This early intercourse with Nature nourishes the soul, deepens the intellect, exalts the imagination, and fills the memory with fair and noble forms and images which abide with us, and as years pass on, gain in softness and purity what they may lose in distinctness of outline and color. This is the source of intellectual wealth, of tranquil moods, of patience in the midst of opposition, of confidence in the fruitfulness of labor and the transforming power of time. Here is given the material which must be molded into form; the rude blocks which must be cut and dressed and fitted together until they become a spiritual temple wherein the soul may rest at one with God and Nature, and with its own thought and love. To run, to jump, to ride, to swim, to skate, to sit in the shade of trees by flowing water, to watch reapers at their work, to look on orchards blossoming, to dream in the silence that lies amid the hills, to feel the solemn loneliness of deep woods, to follow cattle as they crop the sweet-scented clover,—to learn to know, as one knows a mother's face, every change that comes over the heavens from the dewy freshness of early dawn to the restful calm of evening, from the overpowering mystery of the starlit sky to the tender human look with which the moon smiles upon the earth,—all this is education of a higher and altogether more real kind than it is possible to receive within the walls of a school; and lacking this, nothing shall have power to develop the faculties of the soul in symmetry and completeness. Hence a philosopher has said there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace. The daily intercourse with Nature in childhood and youth intertwines with noble and enduring objects the passions which form the mind and heart of man, whereas those who are shut out from such communion are necessarily thrown into contact with what is mean and vulgar; and since our early years, whatever our surroundings may have been, seem to us sweet and fair because life itself is then a clear-flowing fountain, they cannot help blending the memory of that innocent and happy time with thoughts of base and mechanical objects, or, it may be, of low and ignoble associates.

He is fortunate who, during the first ten years of his life, escapes the confinement and repression of school, and lives at home in the country amid the fields and the woods, day by day growing familiar with the look on Nature's face, with all her moods, with every common object, with living things in the air and the water and on the earth; who sees the corn sprout, and watches it grow week after week until the yellow harvest waves in the sunlight; who looks with unawed eye on rising thunder-clouds and shouts with glee amid the lightning's play; who learns to know that whatever he looks upon is thereby humanized, and to feel that he is part of all he sees and loves. He will carry with him to the study of the intellectual and spiritual world of men's thoughts shut up in books, a strength of mind, a depth and freshness of heart which only those can own who have drunk at Nature's deep flowing fountain, and come up to life's training-course wet with her dews and with the fragrance of her flowers on their breath. In the eyes of the old Greeks, who first made education a science, the scholar was an idler,—one who had leisure to look about him, to stroll amid the olive groves, to let his eye rest upon the purple hills or the blue sea studded with green isles, to listen to the brooks and the nightingales, to read the lesson the fair earth teaches more than that imprinted on parchment; and the school must still preserve something of this freedom from constraint, must encourage the play of body and of mind, the delight natural to the young in the exercise of strength of whatever kind, and thus as far as possible lighten the labor and drudgery of elementary studies with thoughts of liberty, of beauty, and of excellence. Let the boy feel how good it is to be alive though life meant only the narrow world and the mere surfaces of things with which alone it is possible for him to be acquainted; and then when we ask him to believe that in high thinking and in noble acting he will find a life infinitely more worthy, his eager soul will be inflamed with a desire for knowledge and virtue, and bearing in his heart the strength and wealth of imagination gained from his early experience, his thoughts will turn to great and good men. Dim visions of mighty conquerors, of poets at whose song the woods and waves grow calm, of orators whose words with storm-like force, whatever way they take, sweep with them the wills of men,—will rise before his mind. His young fancy will endow them with preternatural qualities; and he will yearn to draw near, to mingle with them and to catch the secret of their divine power. The germ of the godlike within his bosom bursts and springs. What they were, why may not he also become? What bars are thrown athwart his path, what obstacles hem his way, which, whoever in any age has excelled, has not had to break down and surmount? Here the wise teacher comes to cheer him, to tell him his faith is not wrong, his hope not without promise of attainment if he but trust himself, and bend his whole mind to the task; that whatever goal within the scope of human power, the will sets to itself, it may reach.

In order to develop, strengthen, and confirm this high mood, this noble temper, let him by all means be made acquainted with the language and genius of Greece. Here he will