be acquired through the bodily senses, but which
is dull and confused and wandering when put to abstract book-knowledge.
He knows every ship at the wharf, her build, tonnage, and sailing
qualities; he knows every railroad-engine, its power, speed, and hours
of coming and going; he is always busy, sawing, hammering, planing,
digging, driving, making bargains, with his head full of plans, all
relating to something outward and physical. In all these matters his
mind works strongly, his ideas are clear, his observation acute, his
conversation sensible and worth listening to. But as to the distinction
between common nouns and proper nouns, between the subject and the
predicate of a sentence, between the relative pronoun and the
demonstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and the
preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy. The region of
abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts and shadows. Yet his youth
is mainly a dreary wilderness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible
studies, of privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual
failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father is trying to
make a scholar and a literary man out of a boy whom Nature made to till
the soil or manage the material forces of the world. He might be a
farmer, an engineer, a pioneer of a new settlement, a sailor, a soldier,
a thriving man of business; but he grows up feeling that his nature is a
crime, and that he is good for nothing, because he is not good for what
he had been blindly predestined to before he was born.

Another boy is a born mechanic; he understands machinery at a glance; he
is all the while pondering and studying and experimenting. But his
wheels and his axles and his pulleys are all swept away, as so much
irrelevant lumber; he is doomed to go into the Latin School, and spend
three or four years in trying to learn what he never can learn
well,--disheartened by always being at the tail of his class, and seeing
many a boy inferior to himself in general culture who is rising to
brilliant distinction simply because he can remember those hopeless,
bewildering Greek quantities and accents which he is constantly
forgetting,--as, for example, how properispomena become paroxytones when
the ultimate becomes long, and proparoxytones become paroxytones when
the ultimate becomes long, while paroxytones with a short penult remain
paroxytones. Each of this class of rules, however, having about sixteen
exceptio