gossip the whole way about things better left unspoken; or, if they
were clever ones, fall on arguing and brainsbeating on politics or
metaphysics from the moment they left the door, and return with
their wits even more heated and tired than they were when they set
out. I cannot help fancying that Milton made a mistake in a
certain celebrated passage; and that it was not "sitting on a hill
apart," but tramping four miles out and four miles in along a
turnpike-road, that his hapless spirits discoursed


"Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost."


Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our children any good, we
must give them a love for rural sights, an object in every walk; we
must teach them - and we can teach them - to find wonder in every
insect, sublimity in every hedgerow, the records of past worlds in
every pebble, and boundless fertility upon the barren shore; and
so, by teaching them to make full use of that limited sphere in
which they now are, make them faithful in a few things, that they
may be fit hereafter to be rulers over much.

I may seem to exaggerate the advantages of such studies; but the
question after all is one of experience: and I have had experience
enough and to spare that what I say is true. I have seen the young
man of fierce passions, and uncontrollable daring, expend healthily
that energy which threatened daily to plunge him into recklessness,
if not into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through rock and
bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg of the neighbouring