newspapers and magazines. An uneducated carrier who can neither read, cipher, nor write, I have known with a most exact and retentive power of recollection of commissions entrusted to him and of prices paid. One reads of men in old days who could recite the Psalter by heart. I have a difficulty in repeating accurately the 117th Psalm: that consists of two verses only. No one ever had a well-trained memory without afterwards having good reason to entertain profound gratitude towards those who secured him the boon. No one ever studied and thought in after life without perceiving how indispensable is a retentive memory. No man of mind but must rejoice in the power of knowing things by heart—a power, however, which will hardly come afterwards to those in whom it has not been cultivated at an early age.
What my father aimed at was the development of the faculty for obtaining a general impression, and forming a précis of any book read. And this is a most valuable acquisition. This I did acquire. I admit that it has been to me of inestimable value. But what has been with me a corresponding drawback has been an inability to remember anything read or done exactly as read or as transacted.
A third point in my father's system was the depression of the imagination. He particularly objected to fairy tales, and it was only by luck that I came across them. Never can I forget the delight afforded me by Simrock's Rheinsagen. To the present day I see before my eyes Charlemagne looking dreamily into the waters into which the Ring of Fastrada had been cast; and the Lorelei on her rock luring boats over to destruction. That book, read whilst I was but a child, impressed my whole life with delight in historical and legendary lore. Another book read in Germany that filled me with exquisite pleasure was Hauff's Märchen. These stories opened to me a world of the past in which I loved to revel. But these books were taboo, and we were expected to satisfy our minds with Sandford and Merton, and, above all with Dr. Aikin's Evenings at Home.
The childish mind soars after the unseen, and loves to revel in what is of the past, in spiritual influences at the present, and to chain the imagination down to what is merely material stunts it.
