indeed, a sacrifice of the end of living for the means.

Another check to recreation is the narrow way in which people have
hitherto been brought up at schools and colleges. The classics are
pre-eminent works. To acquire an accurate knowledge of them is an
admirable discipline. Still, it would be well to give a youth but
few of these great works, and so leave time for various arts,
accomplishments, and knowledge of external things exemplified by
other means than books. If this cannot be done but by over-working,
then it had better not be done; for of all things, that must be
avoided. But surely it can be done. At present, many a man who is
versed in Greek metre, and afterwards full of law reports, is
childishly ignorant of Nature. Let him walk with an intelligent
child for a morning, and the child will ask him a hundred questions
about sun, moon, stars, plants, birds, building, farming, and the
like, to which he can give very sorry answers, if any; or, at the
best, he has but a second-hand acquaintance with Nature. Men's
conceits are his main knowledge. Whereas, if he had any pursuits
connected with Nature, all Nature is in harmony with it, is brought
into his presence by it, and it affords at once cultivation and
recreation.

But, independently of those cultivated pursuits which form a high
order of recreation, boyhood should never pass without the boy's
learning several modes of recreation of the humbler kind. A parent
or teacher seldom does a kinder thing by the child under his care
than when he instructs it in some manly exercise, some pursuit
connected with Nature out of doors, or even some domestic game. In
hours of fatigue, anxiety, sickness, or worldly ferment, such means
of amusement may delight the grown-up man when other things would