54 GLAUCUS; OR, 
exercise ; and as a recreation, utterly nil. I never 
knew two young lads go out for a “constitutional,” 
who did not, if they were commonplace youths, 
gossip the whole way about things better left un- 
spoken; or, if they were clever ones, fall on arguing 
and brainsbeating on politics or metaphysics from 
the moment they left the door, and return with their 
wits even more heated and tired than they were 
when they set out. I cannot help fancying that 
Milton made a mistake in a certain celebrated 
passage ; and that it was not “sitting on a hill 
apart,” but tramping four miles out and four miles 
in along a turnpike-road, that his hapless spirits 
discoursed 
“Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, 
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.” 
Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our 
children any good, we must give them a love for 
rural sights, an object in every walk; we must 
teach them—-and we can teach them—to find 
wonder in every insect, sublimity in every hedge- 
row, the records of past worlds in every pebble, and 
