Experience is already showing that the advantages of school-gymnasiums go deeper than was at first supposed.  It is not to be the whole object of American education to create scholars or idealists, but to produce persons of a solid strength,—­persons who, to use the most expressive Western phrase that ever was coined into five monosyllables, “will do to tie to”; whereas to most of us it would be absurd to tie anything but the Scriptural millstone.  In the military school of Brienne, the only report appended to the name of the little Napoleon Bonaparte was “Very healthy”; and it is precisely this class of boys for whom there is least place in a purely intellectual institution.  A child of immense animal activity and unlimited observing faculties, personally acquainted with every man, child, horse, dog, in the township,—­intimate in the families of oriole and grasshopper, pickerel and turtle,—­quick of hand and eye,—­in short, born for practical leadership and victory,—­such a boy finds no provision for him in most of our seminaries, and must, by his constitution, be either truant or torment.  The theory of the institution ignores such aptitudes as his, and recognizes no merits save those of some small sedentary linguist or mathematician,—­a blessing to his teacher, but an object of watchful anxiety to the family physician, and whose career was endangering not only his health, but his humility.  Introduce now some athletic exercises as a regular part of the school-drill, instantly the rogue finds his legitimate sphere, and leads the class; he is no longer an outcast, no longer has to look beyond the school for companions and appreciation; while, on the other hand, the youthful pedant, no longer monopolizing superiority, is brought down to a proper level.  Presently comes along some finer fellow than either, who cultivates all his faculties, and is equally good at spring-board and black-board; and straightway, since every child wishes to be a Crichton, the whole school tries for the combination of merits, and the grade of the juvenile community is perceptibly raised.

What is true of childhood is true of manhood also.  What a shame it is that even Kingsley should fall into the cant of deploring maturity as a misfortune, and declaring that our freshest pleasures come “before the age of fourteen”!  Health is perpetual youth,—­that is, a state of positive health.  Merely negative health, the mere keeping out of the hospital for a series of years, is not health.  Health is to feel the body a luxury, as every vigorous child does,—­as the bird does when it shoots and quivers through the air, not flying for the sake of the goal, but for the sake of the flight,—­as the dog does when he scours madly across the meadow, or plunges into the muddy blissfulness of the stream.  But neither dog nor bird nor child enjoys his cup of physical happiness—­let the dull or the worldly say what they will—­with a felicity so cordial as the educated palate of conscious manhood.  To “feel one’s life in every limb,” this is the secret bliss of which all forms of athletic exercise are merely varying disguises; and it is absurd to say that we cannot possess this when character is mature, but only when it is half-developed.  As the flower is better than the bud, so should the fruit be better than the flower.