Insight--the so to speak scientific grip of a great poet--is amongst those “more things” in heaven and earth than our philosophy has dreamed of. Wordsworth tells us that after the lapse of years, these beauteous forms (of Tintern Abbey) gave him sensations. Now we are apt to think that sensations can only be immediate, perceived on the instant that the object is present to the senses; but the poet is, as usual, absolutely right: we may have, so to speak, reflected sensations, as well as those that are immediate, because a conscious sensation depends upon the recognition of an impression in the sensory centres, and this recognition may be evoked, not only by a repeated sensation, but by an association which recalls the image once permanently impressed by the original sensation. Wordsworth is exquisitely right when he speaks of the repeated enjoyment of sensations sweet. “In lonely rooms and ’mid the din of towns and cities” some sudden touch of the cords of association has brought to him the soothing joy of a picture--“Forms” with every grace of symmetry, harmony, venerable antiquity, in the ever fresh and gracious setting of a beautiful landscape. The eye of his mind is infinitely gladdened; the ear of his mind, no longer conscious of the din of cities, hears the chord struck by the Wye in its flow, and the notes of the birds and the lowing of the cattle and the acuter notes of the insect world. Again he perceives the odour of the meadow-sweet, he touches the coolness of the grass, and all these are as absolutely sensations as when they were for the first time conveyed to his consciousness by the sensory organs. We have in these few lines a volume of reasons why we should fill the storehouse of memory for the children with many open-air images, capable of giving them reflected sensations of extreme delight. Our care all the time must be to secure that they do look, and listen, touch, and smell, and the way to this is by sympathetic action on our part: what we look at they will look at; the odours we perceive they too will get. We heard, the other day, of a little girl who travelled in Italy with her parents, in the days of dignified family travelling-carriages. The child’s parents were conscientious, and time was precious, not by any means to be wasted on the mere idleness of travelling, so the governess and the little girl had the _coupé_ to themselves, and in it were packed all the paraphernalia of the schoolroom, and she did her sums, learned her geography, probably the counties of England, and all the rest of it, with the least possible waste of time in idle curiosity as to what the “faire londes,” through which she was passing, might be like. A story like this shows that we are making advances, but we are still far from fully recognising that our part in the education of children should be thoughtfully subordinated to that played by Nature herself.