“The hours the idle schoolboy squandered
  The man would die ere he’d forget.”

Only keep in a boy a pure and generous heart, and, whether he work or play, his time can scarcely be wasted.  Which really has done most for the education of Boston,—­Dixwell and Sherwin, or Sheridan and Braman?

Should it prove, however, that the cultivation of active exercises diminishes the proportion of time given by children to study, we can only view it as an added advantage.  Every year confirms us in the conviction, that our schools, public and private, systematically overtask the brains of the rising generation.  We all complain that Young America grows to mental maturity too soon, and yet we all contribute our share to continue the evil.  It is but a few weeks since we saw the warmest praises, in the New York newspapers, of a girl’s school, in that city, where the appointed hours of study amounted to nine and a quarter daily, and the hours of exercise to a bare unit.  Almost all the Students’ Manuals assume that American students need stimulus instead of restraint, and urge them to multiply the hours of study and diminish those of out-door amusements and of sleep, as if the great danger did not lie that way already.  When will parents and teachers learn to regard mental precocity as a disaster to be shunned, instead of a glory to be coveted?  We could count up a dozen young men who have graduated at Harvard College, during the last twenty years, with high honors, before the age of eighteen; and we suppose that nearly every one of them has lived to regret it.  “Nature,” says Tissot, in his Essay on the Health of Men of Letters, “is unable successfully to carry on two rapid processes at the same time.  We attempt a prodigy, and the result is a fool.”  There was a child in Languedoc who at six years was of the size of a large man; of course, his mind was a vacuum.  On the other hand, Jean Philippe Baratier was a learned man in his eighth year, and died of apparent old age at twenty.  Both were monstrosities, and a healthy childhood would be equidistant from either.

One invaluable merit of out-door sports is to be found in this, that they afford the best cement for childish friendship.  Their associations outlive all others.  There is many a man, now perchance hard and worldly, whom we love to pass in the street simply because in meeting him we meet spring flowers and autumn chestnuts, skates and cricket-balls, cherry-birds and pickerel.  There is an indescribable fascination in the gradual transference of these childish companionships into maturer relations.  We love to encounter in the contests of manhood those whom we first met at football, and to follow the profound thoughts of those who always dived deeper, even in the river, than our efforts could attain.  There is a certain governor, of whom we personally can remember only, that he found the Fresh Pond heronry, which we sought in vain; and in memory the august sheriff of a neighboring county still skates in victorious pursuit of us, (fit emblem of swift-footed justice!) on the black ice of the same lovely lake.  Our imagination crowns the Cambridge poet, and the Cambridge sculptor, not with their later laurels, but with the willows out of which they taught us to carve whistles, shriller than any trump of fame, in the happy days when Mount Auburn was Sweet Auburn still.