Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/151

 dwindles, or finds some mischievous outlet. I have already referred to the desirableness of field exercises, and such as are of an arduous sort, in the management of a home-trained family; and as to the overflowing energy of the mind, during this same period, we must, in the place of the severely exacted exercises of school, devise labours, some samples of which will hereafter be given, such as shall not merely engage the mental force, but such as shall form into a habit the serious feeling of having to achieve a task, peremptorily demanded at a certain time.

The difficulty at home, under intelligent management, is not that of imparting any desired amount of information, or of awakening the faculties, or of giving them a high degree of activity; all which may easily be done; but the point of trial for our domestic system, let it be confessed is the forming file habit of, impelled by motives that are seen and felt to be. The very same task which costs the mind the most grievous struggles between its inclination to desist, and its wish to proceed—if the motive be a little loose or questionable, this task, not a whir abated, is performed with alacrity and ease, when once it is looked at as in no way possibly to be evaded. The sense of absolute necessity is that which makes all things easy—converting the impossible into the practicable.

Merely looking therefore at the learner's own present comfort, we should wish him, at times at least, to come under the stern law of necessity in his mental exercises. But this is not all, for it is certain that the business of life, and especially in some of the professions, demands a power of vigorous, long-continued application to the most irksome labours; nor are the highest offices exempt from more or less of what must be called drudgery. A man whose faculty of attention is speedily exhausted, who resents steady application to dry details, and who finds frivolous pretexts