forced to load their minds with a score of subjects against an
examination, who have too much on their hands to indulge themselves in
thinking or investigation, who devour premise and conclusion together
with indiscriminate greediness, who hold whole sciences on faith, and
commit demonstrations to memory, and who too often, as might be
expected, when their period of education is passed, throw up all they
have learned in disgust, having gained nothing really by their anxious
labours, except perhaps the habit of application.

Yet such is the better specimen of the fruit of that ambitious system
which has of late years been making way among us: for its result on
ordinary minds, and on the common run of students, is less satisfactory
still; they leave their place of education simply dissipated and relaxed
by the multiplicity of subjects, which they have never really mastered,
and so shallow as not even to know their shallowness. How much better, I
say, it is for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be
found, to eschew the college and the university altogether, than to
submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much
more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of
education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as
they meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit
suggests! How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with
the exiled prince to find "tongues in the trees, books in the running
brooks!" How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy in
the poem[19]--a poem, whether in conception or execution, one of the
most touching in our language--who, not in the wide world, but ranging
day by day around his widowed mother's home, "a dextrous gleaner" in a
narrow field and with only such slender outfit

as the village school and books a few