a law of our nature, that the
development of a faculty depends upon its exercise. Nature will develop
some quality in every man; for our existence demands the exercise of a
part of our faculties. The faculty used will be developed in excess as
compared with other faculties. It is the business of the teacher to aid
nature. For the most part, he must stimulate, encourage, draw out,
develop, though it may happen that he will be required occasionally to
check a tendency which threatens to absorb or overshadow all the others.
He must, at any rate, prevent the growth of those powers which tend
towards the savage state.

While the teacher creates nothing, he must so draw out the qualities of
the child that it may attain to perfect manhood. He moulds, he renders
symmetrical, the physical, the intellectual, the moral man. Nature
sometimes does this herself, as though she would occasionally furnish a
model man for our imitation, as she has given lines, and forms, and
colors, which all artists of all ages shall copy, but cannot equal. But,
do the best we can, education is more or less artificial; and hence the
child of the school will suffer by comparison with the child of nature,
when she presents him in her best forms.

In a summer ramble I met a man so dignified as to attract the notice and
command the respect of all who knew him. I was with him upon the lakes
and mountains several days and nights, and never for a moment did the
manliness of his character desert him. I have seen no other person who
could boast such physical beauty. Accustomed to a hunter's life;
carrying often a pack of thirty or forty or fifty pounds; sleeping upon
the ground or a bed of boughs; able, if necessity of interest demanded,
to travel in the woods the ordinary distance which a good horse would
pass over upon our roads; with every organ of the arm, the leg, the
trunk, fully expressed; with a manly, kind, intelligent countenance, a
beard uncut, in the vigor of early manhood, he seemed a model which the
statuaries of Greece and Rome desired to see, but did not. He had at
once the bearing of a soldier and the characteristics of a gentleman. He
was ignorant of grammatical rules and definitions, yet his conversation
would have been accepted in good circles of New England society. This
man had his faults, but they were not grievous faults, nor did they in
any manner affect the qualities of which I have spoken.

This is what nature sometimes does; this i