LET me tell you, my dear lads, some of the things I would do if I were a boy again, some of the too-often neglected acts I would strive to accomplish if it were in my power to begin all over anew.
This paper was written expressly for you young fellows who are beginning to think for yourselves, and are not averse to hearing what an old boy, who loves you, has to say to his younger fellow- students.
When we are no longer young we look back and see where we might have done better and learned more, and the things we have neglected rise up and mortify us every day of our lives. May I enumerate some of the important matters, large and small, that, if I were a boy again, I would be more particular about?
I think I would learn to use my left hand just as freely as my right one, so that, if anything happened to lame either of them, the other would be all ready to write and “handle things,” just as if nothing had occurred. There is no reason in the world why both hands should not be educated alike. A little practice would soon render one set of fingers just as expert as the other; and I have known people who never thought, when a thing was to be done, which particular hand ought to do it, but the hand nearest the object took hold of it and did the office desired.
I would accustom myself to go about in the dark, and not be obliged to have a lamp or candle on every occasion. Too many of us are slaves to the daylight, and decline to move forward an inch unless everything is visible. One of the most cheerful persons I ever knew was a blind old man, who had lost his sight by an accident at sea during his early manhood. He went everywhere, and could find things more easily than I could. When his wife wanted a spool of cotton, or a pair of scissors from up stairs, the gallant old gentleman went without saying a word, and brought it. He never asked any one to reach him this or that object, but seemed to have the instinct of knowing just where it was and how to get at it. Surprised at his power of finding things, I asked him one day for an explanation; and he told me that, when he was a boy on board a vessel, it occurred to him that he might some time or other be deprived of sight, and he resolved to begin early in life to rely more on a sense of feeling than he had ever done before. And so he used to wander, by way of practice, all over the ship in black midnight, going down below, and climbing around anywhere and everywhere, that he might, in case of blindness, not become wholly helpless and of no account in the world. In this way he had educated himself to do without eyes when it became his lot to live a sightless man.
IF I WERE A BOY AGAIN, I would learn the art of using tools of various sorts. I think I would insist on learning some trade, even if I knew there would be no occasion to follow it when I grew up. What a pleasure it is in after-life to be able to make something, as the saying is to construct a neat box to hold one’s pen and paper; or a pretty cabinet for a sister’s library; or to frame a favorite engraving for a Christmas present to a dear, kind mother. What a loss not to know how to mend a chair that refuses to stand up strong only because it needs a few tacks and a bit of leather here and there ! Some of us cannot even drive a nail straight; and, should we attempt to saw off an obtrusive piece of wood, ten to one we should lose a finger in the operation.
It is a pleasant relaxation from books and study to work an hour every day in a tool-shop; and my friend, the learned and lovable Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, finds such a comfort in “mending things,” when his active brain needs repose, that he sometimes breaks a piece of furniture on purpose that he may have the relief of putting it together again much better than it was before. He is as good a mechanic as he is a poet; but there is nothing mechanical about his poetry, as you all know who have read his delightful pieces. An English author of great repute said to me not long ago, “Professor Holmes is writing the best English of our time.” And I could not help adding, “Yes, and inventing the best stereoscopes, too!”
I think I would ask permission, if I had happened to be born in a city, to have the opportunity of passing all my vacations in the country, that I might learn the names of trees and flowers and birds. We are, as a people, sadly ignorant of all accurate rural knowledge. We guess at many country things, but we are certain of very few.
It is inexcusable in a grown-up person, like my amiable neighbor Simpkins, who lives from May to November on a farm of sixty acres in a beautiful, wooded country, not to know a maple from a beech, or a bobolink from a catbird. He once handed me a bunch of pansies, and called them violets, and on another occasion he mistook sweet peas for geraniums.
What right has a human being, while the air is full of bird-music, to be wholly ignorant of the performer’s name! When we go to the opera, we are fully posted up with regard to all the principal singers, and why should we know nothing of the owners of voices that far transcend the vocal powers of Jenny Lind and Christine Nilsson.
A boy ought also to be at home in a barn, and learn how to harness a horse, tinker up a wagon, feed the animals, and do a hundred useful things, the experience of which may be of special service to him in after-life as an explorer or a traveller, when unlooked-for emergencies befall him. I have seen an ex-President of the United States, when an old man, descend from his carriage, and re-arrange buckles and straps about his horses when an accident occurred, while the clumsy coachman stood by in a kind of hopeless inactivity, not knowing the best thing to be done. The ex-President told me he had learned about such matters on a farm in his boyhood, and so he was never at loss for remedies on the road when his carriage broke down.
If I were a boy again, I would learn how to row a boat and handle a sail, and, above all, how to become proof against sea-sickness. I would conquer that malady before I grew to be fifteen years old. It can be done, and ought to be done in youth, for all of us are more or less inclined to visit foreign countries, either in the way of business or mental improvement, to say nothing of pleasure. Fight the sea-sick malady long enough, and it can be conquered at a very early age.
Charles Dickens, seeing how ill his first voyage to America made him, resolved after he got back to England to go into a regular battle with the winds and waves, and never left off crossing the British Channel, between Dover and Calais, in severe weather, until he was victor over his own stomach, and could sail securely after that in storms that kept the ravens in their nests. “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” even out of ocean troubles; but it is well to begin early to assert supremacy over salt-water difficulties. “When Caesar undertook a thing,” says his biographer, “his body was no obstacle.”
Of course every young person nowadays, male or female, learns to swim, and so no advice on that score need be proffered ; but if I were a boy again I would learn to float half a day, if necessary, in as rough a bit of water as I could find on our beautiful coast. A boy of fifteen who cannot keep his head and legs all right in a stiff sea ought to try until he can. No lad in these days ought to drown, if he can help it!
I would keep “better hours,” if I were a boy again; that is, I would go to bed earlier than most boys do. Nothing gives more mental and bodily vigor than sound rest when properly applied. Sleep is our great replenisher, and if we neglect to take it naturally in childhood, all the worse for us when we grow up. If we go to bed early, we ripen; if we sit up late, we decay, and sooner or later we contract a disease called insomnia, allowing it to be permanently fixed upon us; and then we begin to decay, even in youth. Late hours are shadows from the grave.
If I were a boy again, I would have a blank-book in which I could record, before going to bed, every day’s events just as they happened to me personally. If I began by writing only two lines a day in my diary, I would start my little book, and faithfully put down what happened to interest me. On its pages I would note down the habits of birds and animals as I saw them, and if the horse fell ill, down should go his malady in my book, and what cured him should go there too. If the cat or the dog showed any peculiar traits, they should all be chronicled in my diary, and nothing worth recording should escape me.
There are hundreds of things I would correct in my life if I were a boy again, and among them is this especial one: I would be more careful of my teeth. Seeing since I have grown up how much suffering is induced by the bad habit of constantly eating candies and other sweet nuisances, I would shut my mouth to all allurements of that sort. Very hot and very cold substances I would studiously avoid. Toothache in our country is one of the national crimes. Too many people we meet have swelled faces. The dentist thrives here as he does in no other land on this planet, and it is because we begin to spoil our teeth at the age of five or six years. A child, eight years old, asked me not long ago if I could recommend him to a dentist “who didn’t hurt”! I pitied him, but I was unacquainted with such an artist. They all hurt, and they cannot help it, poor, hard-working gentlemen, charging, as they do, like Chester.
I would have no dealings with tobacco, in any form, if I were a boy again. My friend Pipes tells me he is such a martyr to cigar-boxes that his life is a burden. The habit of smoking has become such a tyrant over him that he carries a tobacco bowsprit at his clamp, discolored lips every hour of the day, and he begs me to warn all the boys of my acquaintance, and say to them emphatically, “Don’t learn to smoke! ” He tells me, sadly, that his head is sometimes in such a dizzy whirl, and his brain so foul from long habits of smoking he cannot break off, that he is compelled to forego much that is pleasant in existence, and live a tobacco-tortured life from year to year. Poor Pipes! he is a sad warning to young fellows who are just learning to use the dirty, unmannerly weed.
As I look back to my school-days I can remember so many failures through not understanding how to avoid them, that I feel compelled to have this plain talk all round with you. I take it for granted that I am writing for those sensible lads who mean to have their minds keep the best company possible, and never suffer them to go sneaking about for inferiority in anything. To be young is a great advantage, and now is the golden time to store away treasures for the future. I never knew a youth yet who would be willing to say, “I don’t mean to get understanding; I don’t wish to know much of anything; I have no desire to compass today more and better things than I knew yesterday; I prefer, when I grow up, to be an ignorant man, a mere passive wheel in the great machine of the universe.” The richest rascal that ever lived never started with the idea in boyhood that he would repudiate morals, make money, and avoid ideas!
One of the most common of all laments is this one, and I have heard it hundreds of times from grayheaded men in every walk of life, “0, that my lost youth could come back to me, and I could have again the chance for improvement I once had ! ” What “lucky fellows” you are, to be sure, with the privilege of being about twelve or fifteen years old! Still keeping within your own control those priceless opportunities when the portals of knowledge are standing wide open and inviting you in, and not one adverse spirit daring to hold you back. Don’t I wish I could be a boy again! We, who are swiftly stepping westward towards the setting sun, cannot help crying out to you, who are still in the Eastern quarter of life, what Horace Mann used to sound in our ears when we were as young as you are,” Orient yourselves!” What we sow in youth we reap in age. The seed of the thistle always produces the thistle. The possibilities that wait upon you who are yet in the spring-time of existence, who are yet holding in your own two hands the precious gift of time, cannot be estimated. Do not forget that a useless life is an early death!
I thank Mr. Longfellow for having written the following lines. When he read them to me I thanked him heartily, and now I do it again, as I quote them for you to commit to memory from these pages: “How beautiful is youth! How bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of beginnings, story without end, (Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!) Aladdin’s lamp, and Fortunatus’ purse, that holds the treasures of the universe! All possibilities are in its hands, No danger daunts it, and no foe withstands: In its sublime audacity of faith, ‘ Be thou removed! ‘ it to the mountain saith, And with ambitious feet, secure and proud, Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud!”
I wonder if any of you, my young friends, ever happened to read of a poor, unhappy old man who stood one New Year’s night at the window of his dwelling and thought over all the errors of his youth, what he had neglected to do of good, and what he had committed of evil; how his bosom was filled with remorse, how his desolate soul was wrung as he reflected on the past follies of a long life. The days when he was strong and active wandered about him like ghosts. It was too late to retrieve his lost youth. The grave was waiting for him, and with unspeakable grief he bethought him of the time spent in idleness, of the left-hand road he had chosen which had led him into ruinous follies and years of slothfulness. Then he recalled the names of his early companions who had selected the right-hand path, and were now happy and content in their declining days, having lived the lives of virtuous, studious men, doing the best they were able in the world. Then he cried to his dead father, who had warned him when he was a lad to follow the good and shun the evil pathways of existence, “0 father, give me back my lost youth, that I may live a different life from the one I have so long pursued ! ” But it was too late now to make moan. His father and his youth had gone together. There the poor bewildered creature stands, blinded with tears, but still beseeching Heaven to give him back his youth once more. Few spectacles are more terrible to contemplate than the broken-down figure of that weeping old man, lamenting that he cannot be young again, for then he would lead a life so different from the one he had lived.
But what a thrill of pleasure follows the sad picture we have been contemplating when we are told it was only a fearful dream that a certain young man was passing through, a vision only of possible degradation, and that Heaven had taken this method of counselling the youth to turn aside from the allurements that might beset his path, and thus be spared the undying remorse that would surely take possession of him when he grew to be a man, if he gave way to self-indulgence and those wandering idle ways that lead to error, and oftentimes to vice and crime. The misery of a life to be avoided was thus prefigured, and the young man awoke to thank Heaven it was only a dream, and resolve so to spend God’s great gift of time that no horror, such as he had suffered that night in sleep, should ever arise to haunt his waking hours.
If I were a boy again, one of the first things I would strive to do would be this: I would, as soon as possible, try hard to become acquainted with and then deal honestly with myself, to study up my own deficiencies and capabilities, and I would begin early enough, before faults had time to become habits; I would seek out earnestly all the weak spots in my character and then go to work speedily and mend them with better material; if I found that I was capable of some one thing in a special degree, I would ask counsel on that point of some judicious friend, and if advised to pursue it I would devote myself to that particular matter, to the exclusion of much that is foolishly followed in boyhood.
If I were a boy again I would practice perseverance oftener, and never give a thing up because it was hard or inconvenient to do it. If we want light, we must conquer darkness. When I think of mathematics I blush at the recollection of how often I “caved in” years ago. There is no trait more valuable than a determination to persevere when the right thing is to be accomplished. We are all inclined to give up too easily in trying or unpleasant situations, and the point I would establish with myself, if the choice were again within my grasp, would be never to relinquish my hold on a possible success if mortal strength or brains in my case were adequate to the occasion. That was a capital lesson which Professor Faraday taught one of his students in the lecture-room after some chemical experiments. The lights had been put out in the hall and by accident some small article dropped on the floor from the professor’s hand. The professor lingered behind, endeavoring to pick it up. “Never mind,” said the student, “it is of no consequence tonight, sir, whether we find it or no.” “That is true,” replied the professor; ” but it is of grave consequence to me as a principle, that I am not foiled in my determination to find it.”Perseverance can sometimes equal genius in its results.” There are only two creatures,” says the Eastern proverb, “who can surmount the pyramids, the eagle and the snail!”
If I were a boy again I would school myself into a habit of attention oftener, I would let nothing come between me and the subject in hand. I would remember that an expert on the ice never tries to skate in two directions at once. One of our great mistakes, while we are young, is that we do not attend strictly to what we are about just then, at that particular moment; we do not bend our energies close enough to what we are doing or learning; we wander into a half- interest only, and so never acquire fully what is needful for us to become master of. The practice of being habitually attentive is one easily obtained, if we begin early enough. I often hear grown-up people say, “I couldn’t fix my attention on the sermon, or book, although I wished to do so,” and the reason is that a habit of attention was never formed in youth. Let me tell you a sad instance of a neglected power of concentration. A friend asked me once to lend him an interesting book, something that would enchain his attention, for he said he was losing the power to read. After a few days he brought back the volume, saying it was no doubt a work of great value and beauty, but that the will to enjoy it had gone from him forever, -for other matters would intrude themselves on the page he was trying to understand and enjoy, and rows of figures constantly marshalled themselves on the margin, adding themselves up at the bottom of the leaf!
If I were to live my life over again I would pay more attention to the cultivation of memory. I would strengthen that faculty by every possible means and on every possible occasion. It takes a little hard work at first to remember things accurately, but memory soon helps itself and gives very little trouble. It only needs early cultivation to become a power. Everybody can acquire it. When I was a youth, a classmate of mine came to me with a long face and told me he was in danger of being supplanted in the regard of a young person of the gentler sex by a smart fellow belonging to another school, who was daily in the habit of calling on the lady and repeating to her from memory whole poems of considerable length. “What would you do?” sighed the lad to me. “Do?” said I, ” I would beat him on his own ground, and at once commit to memory the whole of ‘Paradise Lost,’ book by book, and every time the intruder left Amelia’s house, I would rush in and fire away ! Depend upon it,” I said, “she is quite taken by surprise with the skillful memory of her new acquaintance, and you must beat him with surpassing feats of the same quality.” “0, but,” said my friend, ” I have, as you know, a very poor memory!” “The more reason now for cultivating that department of your intellect,” I rejoined. “If you give way to idle repining and do nothing, that fellow will soon be firmly seated in your place. I should not wonder if he were now at work on Thomson’s ‘Seasons/ for his infamous purpose. Delay no longer, but attack John Milton after supper tonight, and win the prize above all competition! ” Ezekiel began in good earnest, and before the summer was over he had memorized the whole of “Paradise Lost,” rehearsed it to Amelia, and gained the victory!
If I were a boy again I would know more about the history of my own country than is usual, I am sorry to say, with young Americans. When in England I have always been impressed with the minute and accurate knowledge constantly observable in young English lads of average intelligence and culture concerning the history of Great Britain. They not only have a clear and available store of historical dates at hand for use on any occasion, but they have a wonderfully good idea of the policy of government adopted by all the prominent statesmen in different eras down to the present time. An acquaintance of mine in England, a boy of fourteen, gave me one day such eloquent and intelligent reasons for his preference of Edmund Burke above all other patriotic statesmen of his time, as made me reflect how little the average American lad of that age would be apt to know of the comparative merits of Webster and Calhoun as men of mark and holding the highest consideration thirty years ago in the United States. If the history of any country is worth an earnest study it is surely the history of our own land, and we cannot begin too early in our lives to master it fully and completely. What a confused notion of distinguished Americans a boy must have to reply, as one did not long ago when asked by his teacher, “Who was Washington Irving 1” “A General in the Revolutionary War, sir.”
If I were a boy again I would strive to become a fearless person, I would cultivate courage as one of the highest achievements of life. “Nothing is so mild and gentle as courage, nothing is so cruel and vindictive as cowardice,” says the wise author of a late essay on conduct. Too many of us nowadays are overcome by fancied lions in the way, lions that never existed out of our own brains. Nothing is so credulous as fear. Some weak- minded horses are forever looking around for white stones to shy at, and if we are hunting for terrors they will be sure to turn up in some shape or other. In America we are too prone to borrow trouble and anticipate evils that may never appear. “The fear of ill exceeds the ill we fear.” Abraham Lincoln once said he never crossed Fox River, no matter how high the stream was, until he came to it! Dangers will arise in any career, but presence of mind will often conquer the worst of them. Be prepared for any fate, and there is no harm to be feared. Achilles, you remember, was said to be invulnerable, but he never went into battle without being completely armed!
If I were a boy again I would look on the cheerful side of everything, for everything almost has a cheerful side. Life is very much like a mirror; if you smile upon it, it smiles back again on you, but if you frown and look doubtful upon it, you will be sure to get a similar look in return. I once heard it said of a grumbling, unthankful person, “He would have made an uncommonly fine sour apple, if he had happened to be born in that station of life!” Inner sunshine warms not only the heart of the owner, but all who come in contact with it. Indifference begets indifference. “Who shuts love out, in turn shall be shut out from love.”
If I were a boy again I would school myself to say “No” oftener. I might write pages on the importance of learning very early in life to gain that point where a young man can stand erect and decline doing an unworthy thing because it is unworthy, but the whole subject is so admirably treated by dear old President James Walker, who was once the head of Harvard College, that I beg you to get his volume of discourses and read what he has to tell you about saying No on every proper occasion. Dr. Walker had that supreme art of “putting things“ which is now so rare among instructors of youth or age, and what he has left for mankind to read is written in permanent ink.
If I were a boy again I would demand of myself more courtesy towards my companions and friends. Indeed, I would rigorously exact it of myself towards strangers as well. The smallest courtesies, interspersed along the rough roads of life, are like the little English sparrows now singing to us all winter long, and making that season of ice and snow more endurable to everybody.
But I have talked long enough, and this shall be my parting paragraph. Instead of trying so hard as some of us do to be happy, as if that were the sole purpose of life, I would, if I were a boy again, try still harder to deserve happiness.
Author: James Thomas Fields (December 31, 1817 – April 24, 1881)
Chengming Luo 