Any person who has acquired the art of examining and analyzing his own
thoughts will generally find that the mental pictures which he forms of the
landscapes, or the interiors, in which the scenes are laid of the events or
incidents related in any work of fiction which interests him, are modelled
more or less closely from prototypes previously existing in his own mind,
and generally upon those furnished by the experiences of his childhood.
If, for example, he reads an account of transactions represented as taking
place in an English palace or castle, he will usually, on a careful
scrutiny, find that the basis of his conception of the scene is derived
from the arrangement of the rooms of some fine house with which he was
familiar in early life. Thus, a great many things which attract our
attention, and impress themselves upon our memories in childhood, become
the models and prototypes--more or less aggrandized and improved,
perhaps--of the conceptions and images which we form in later years.

_Nature of the Effect produced by Early Impressions_.

Few persons who have not specially reflected on this subject, or examined
closely the operations of their own minds, are aware what an extended
influence the images thus stored in the mind in childhood have in forming
the basis, or furnishing the elements of the mental structures of future
life. But the truth, when once understood, shows of what vast importance it
is with what images the youthful mind is to be stored. A child who ascends
a lofty mountain, under favorable circumstances in his childhood, has his
conceptions of all the mountain scenery that he reads of, or hears of
through life, modified and aggrandized by the impression made upon his
sensorium at this early stage. Take your daughter, who has always, we will
suppose, lived in the country, on an excursion with you to the sea-shore,
and allow her to witness for an hour, as she sits in silence on the cliff,