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 w