Here, too, I made nothing of the longer poems, except the striking opening of _Gertrude of Wyoming_, which long kept its place in my feelings as the perfection of pathos.
During this part of my childhood, one of my greatest amusements was experimental science; in the theoretical, however, not the practical sense of the word; not trying experiments--a kind of discipline which I have often regretted not having had--nor even seeing, but merely reading about them.

I never remember being so wrapt up in any book, as I was in Joyce's _Scientific Dialogues_; and I was rather recalcitrant to my father's criticisms of the bad reasoning respecting the first principles of physics, which abounds in the early part of that work.

I devoured treatises on Chemistry, especially that of my father's early friend and schoolfellow, Dr.Thomson, for years before I attended a lecture or saw an experiment.
From about the age of twelve, I entered into another and more advanced stage in my course of instruction; in which the main object was no longer the aids and appliances of thought, but the thoughts themselves.
This commenced with Logic, in which I began at once with the _Organon_, and read it to the Analytics inclusive, but profited little by the Posterior Analytics, which belong to a branch of speculation I was not yet ripe for.

Contemporaneously with the _Organon_, my father made me read the whole or parts of several of the Latin treatises on the scholastic logic; giving each day to him, in our walks, a minute account of what I had read, and answering his numerous and most searching questions.

After this, I went in a similar manner through the _Computatio sive Logica_ of Hobbes, a work of a much higher order of thought than the books of the school logicians, and which he estimated very highly; in my own opinion beyond its merits, great as these are.