But I know that I learned my letters quickly and early,—though not so early as an elder brother who was always kept steadily before my eyes. It must be that my father gave me little chance to tarry long from one simple book to another, for I remember that at a very early age I was told again and again that John Stuart Mill began studying Greek when he was only three years old. I thought then, as I do to-day, that he must have had a cruel father, and that this unnatural parent not only made miserable the life of his little boy, but of thousands of other boys whose fathers could see no reason why their sons should be outdone by John Stuart Mill. I have no doubt that my good father thought that all his children ought to be able to do anything that was ever accomplished by John Stuart Mill; and so he did his part, and more, to make us try.
But, after all, I feel to-day just as I did long years ago, when with reluctant ear and rebellious heart I heard of the great achievements of John Stuart Mill. I look back to those early years, and still regret the beautiful play-spells that were broken and the many fond childish schemes for pleasure that were shattered because John Stuart Mill began studying Greek when three years old.
I would often shed bitter tears, and mutter exclamations and protests which no one heard, but which were none the less terrible because they were spoken underneath my breath,—and all on account of John Stuart Mill. It was long before I could forgive my gentle honest father for having tried so hard to make me learn those books. I am sure that no good fortune can ever compensate me for the wasted joys, the broken playtimes, the interrupted childish pleasures, which I should have had.
If I were writing this story as I feel to-day, and if I could not recall the little child who had so lately come from the great heart of Nature that he still must have remembered what she felt and thought and knew, I might not regret those broken childish joys. I might rather mourn and lament, with all the teachers and parents and authors, that I was so profligate of my time when I was yet a child, and that I was not more studious in those far-off years. But as I look back to my childhood days, my sluggish heart beats quicker, and I can feel the warm young blood rush to my tingling feet and hands, and I realize once more the strange thrill of delight and joy that life and activity alone bring to all the young. And so I cling to-day to the childish thought that I was right and my poor father wrong. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things,” said the apostle twenty centuries ago. The mistake of maturity and age has ever been that it lives so wholly in the present and so completely forgets the childhood that is past. To guard infancy and youth as a precious heritage, to keep them as long as we can, seems to me the true philosophy of life. For, after all, life is mostly illusions, and the illusions of infancy and childhood and youth are more alluring than those of later years.