into five periods,
according to the ruling desires which successively displace each other
in the human soul. Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, the
second for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourth
for money, and the fifth for a "place" in the country. I think he has
overlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point of
time--the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master of
a chamber to one's self.

How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that
independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!
How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small
chamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor pores
over the "Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks," his longing heightened
as the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney.
There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties his
pockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of the
housemaid. There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment of
Schwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel the
cool shadow of the discoverer's laurel. There the antiquary begins his
collections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistles
of Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late the
property of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate,
who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to make
his children the ornaments of society. There the potential Dibdin or
Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf--more fair to him
than the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe," and
"Gulliver," perhaps "Gil Blas," Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and
Rome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds," the "Parent's Assistant," and
(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," with other narratives
of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.
With these are admitted also "Viri Romae," Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and
even the Latin grammar, because they _count_, playing here upon these
mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators,
a role in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated
volumes--the "books without which no gentleman's library can be
complete."

I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery
of the past to some perch near