s for bodily nutriment, almost
ferociously. From the age of two or thereabouts he valiantly
essays the conquest of articulate speech, using it first to
identify his father or his mother amid the common herd of
Gentiles; next, to demand a more liberal and varied dietary;
anon, as handmaid of his imperious will to learn. This desire,
still in the nursery, climbs--like dissolution in Wordsworth's
sonnet--from low to high: from a craving to discover
experimentally what the stomach will assimilate and what reject,
up to a kingly debonair interest in teleology. Our young
gentleman is perfectly at ease in Sion. He wants to know why
soldiers are (or were) red, and if they were born so; whence
bread and milk is derived, and would it be good manners to thank
the neat cow for both; why mamma married papa, and--that having
been explained and thoughtfully accepted as the best possible
arrangement--still thoughtfully, not in the least censoriously,
'why the All-Father has not married yet?' He falls asleep
weighing the eligibility of various spinsters, church-workers, in
the parish.

His brain teeming with questions, he asks them of impulse and
makes his discoveries with joy. He passes to a school, which is
supposed to exist for the purpose of answering these or cognate
questions even before he asks them: and behold, he is not happy!
Or, he is happy enough at play, or at doing in class the things
that should not be done in class: his master writes home that he
suffers in his school work 'from having always more animal
spirits than are required for his immediate purposes.' What is the
trouble? You cannot explain it by home-sickness: for it attacks
day boys alike with boarders. You cannot explain it by saying
that all true learning involves 'drudgery,' unless you make that
miserable word a mendicant and force it to beg the question.
'Drudgery' is _what you feel to be drudgery_--

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and th' action fine.

--and, anyhow, this child learned one language--English, a most
difficult one--eagerly. Of the nursery through which I passed
only one sister wept while learning to read, and that was over a
scholastic work entitled "Reading Without Tears."

Do you know a chapter in Mr William Canton's book "The Invisible
Playmate" in which, as Carlyle dealt in "Sartor Resartus" with an
imaginary treatise by an imaginary Herr Teufelsdroeckh, as Matthew
Arnold in "Friendship's Garland" with th