As a child, play
was not my chief pleasure, but a sort of mingled
play and constructiveness; then reading and learning;
I well remember the coming on of the desire
to _know_. In a tale, false or true, I had by no
means, the common share of pleasure--Smith's Key
to Reading was more to my taste. Poetry I have
ever loved. History I am very dull at; a chain of
events is far more difficult to follow, than a chain of
ideas--causality comes more to my aid than eventuality.
Well, the age of learning came: in it I
learned this, that, and the other; but, alas! order,
the faculty in which I am so deficient, was wanting,
I had not an appointed place for each fact or idea:
so they were lost as they fell into the confused mass.
I am full of dim apprehensions on almost all subjects,
but _know little_ of any. However, it may be
that this favors new combinations of things. I
would rather have all my ideas in a mass, than have
them in separate locked boxes, where they must each
remain isolated; but it were better they were on
open shelves, and that I had power to take them
down, and combine at will. The age of combining
has come; I feel sensibly the diminution of the
power of acquiring: I can do little in that, but
lament that I have acquired so little; but I seem
rebuked in myself at the incessant wish to gain--gain
for what? I must _do_ something with what, I
gain; for, as I said before, I have nowhere to put it
away.
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