‘But I can’t stop thinking; I can’t make my mind sit down!’ Poor little girl! All children owe you thanks for giving voice to their dumb woes. And we grown-up people have so little imagination, that we send a little boy with an over-active brain to play by himself in a garden in order to escape the fag of lessons. Little we know how the brain-people swarm in and out and rush about!
“The human (brain) is like a millstone, turning ever round and round;
If it have nothing else to grind, it must itself be ground.”[1]
Set the child to definite work by all means, and give him something to grind. But, pray, let him work with things and not with signs – the things of Nature in their own places, meadow and hedgerow, woods and shore.
[1] This is loosely quoted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Poetic Aphorisms”a translation of The Sinngedichte (Epigram) of Friedrich von Logau. The original mentions the human heart not brain.
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