It will be said, What is the use of this? why not leave the reading of great books till a great age? why plague and perplex childhood with complex facts remote from its experience and inapprehensible by its imagination?  The reply is, that though in all great and combined facts there is much which childhood cannot thoroughly imagine, there is also in very many a great deal which can only be truly apprehended for the first time at that age.  Youth has a principle of consolidation; we begin with the whole.  Small sciences are the labors of our manhood; but the round universe is the plaything of the boy.  His fresh mind shoots out vaguely and crudely into the infinite and eternal.  Nothing is hid from the depth of it; there are no boundaries to its vague and wandering vision.  Early science, it has been said, begins in utter nonsense; it would be truer to say that it starts with boyish fancies.  How absurd seem the notions of the first Greeks!  Who could believe now that air or water was the principle, the pervading substance, the eternal material of all things?  Such affairs will never explain a thick rock.  And what a white original for a green and sky-blue world!  Yet people disputed in these ages not whether it was either of those substances, but which of them it was.  And doubtless there was a great deal, at least in quantity, to be said on both sides.  Boys are improved; but some in our own day have asked, “Mamma, I say, what did God make the world of?” and several, who did not venture on speech, have had an idea of some one gray primitive thing, felt a difficulty as to how the red came, and wondered that marble could ever have been the same as moonshine.  This is in truth the picture of life.  We begin with the infinite and eternal, which we shall never apprehend; and these form a framework, a schedule, a set of co-ordinates to which we refer all which we learn later.  At first, like the old Greek, “We look up to the whole sky, and are lost in the one and the all;” in the end we classify and enumerate, learn each star, calculate distances, draw cramped diagrams on the unbounded sky, write a paper on a Cygni and a treatise on e Draconis, map special facts upon the indefinite void, and engrave precise details on the infinite and everlasting.  So in history:  somehow the whole comes in boyhood, the details later and in manhood.  The wonderful series, going far back to the times of old patriarchs with their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical civilization, its fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of ourselves and home,—­when did we learn these?  Not yesterday nor to-day:  but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original flow of fancy.  What we learn afterwards are but the accurate littlenesses of the great topic, the dates and tedious facts.  Those who begin late learn only these; but the happy first feel the mystic associations and the progress of the whole.