the work which education was meant to do. When we receive them merely as
an enlargement of what we know and make of the unseen things of which we
read, things in the image of the seen, then they quite distort our
appreciation of the world.

Consider so simple a thing as a river. A child learns its map and knows,
or thinks it knows, that such and such rivers characterize such and such
nations and their territories. Paris stands upon the River Seine, Rome
upon the River Tiber, New Orleans on the Mississippi, Toledo upon the
River Tagus, and so forth. That child will know one river, the river
near his home. And he will think of all those other rivers in its image.
He will think of the Tagus and the Tiber and the Seine and the
Mississippi--and they will all be the river near his home. Then let him
travel, and what will he come across? The Seine, if he is from these
islands, may not disappoint him or astonish him with a sense of novelty
and of ignorance. It will indeed look grander and more majestic, seen
from the enormous forest heights above its lower course, than what,
perhaps, he had thought possible in a river, but still it will be a
river of water out of which a man can drink, with clear-cut banks and
with bridges over it, and with boats that ply up and down. But let him
see the Tagus at Toledo, and what he finds is brown rolling mud, pouring
solid after the rains, or sluggish and hardly a river after long
drought. Let him go down the Tiber, down the Valley of the Tiber, on
foot, and he will retain until the last miles an impression of nothing
but a turbid mountain torrent, mixed with the friable soil in its bed.
Let him approach the Mississippi in the most part of its long course and
the novelty will be more striking still. It will not seem to him a river
at all (if he be from Northern Europe); it will seem a chance flood. He
will come to it through marshes and through swamps, crossing a deserted
backwater, finding firm land beyond, then coming to further shallow