His whole character will be impressionable, and will respond to the most delicate touches of Nature.
The first requisite of all education and discipline should be man-timber.

Tough timber must come from well grown, sturdy trees.
Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano or an exquisite carving.

But it must become timber first.

Time and patience develop the sapling into the tree.

So through discipline, education, experience, the sapling child is developed into hardy mental, moral, physical man-timber.
If the youth should start out with the fixed determination that every statement he makes shall be the exact truth; that every promise he makes shall be redeemed to the letter; that every appointment shall be kept with the strictest faithfulness and with full regard for other men's time; if he should hold his reputation as a priceless treasure, feel that the eyes of the world are upon him that he must not deviate a hair's breadth from the truth and right; if he should take such a stand at the outset, he would, like George Peabody, come to have almost unlimited credit and the confidence of everybody who knows him.
What are palaces and equipages; what though a man could cover a continent with his title-deeds, or an ocean with his commerce; compared with conscious rectitude, with a face that never turns pale at the accuser's voice, with a bosom that never throbs with fear of exposure, with a heart that might be turned inside out and disclose no stain of dishonor?
To have done no man a wrong; to have put your signature to no paper to which the purest angel in heaven might not have been an attesting witness; to walk and live, unseduced, within arm's length of what is not your own, with nothing between your desire and its gratification but the invisible law of rectitude;--_this is to be a man_.
Man is the only great thing in the universe.