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Learned, 'People in towns, indeed, are wofully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only in the bust, not as a whole length.'

It seems, at the outset, an odd proposition, that where there is the more food, there should be the less fat; that where the means of cultivation and the resources of thought are profusely scattered on every hand, to stimulate the curiosity, the ambition and the taste of the meanest or the most gifted, there should be less profundity of intellectual power. But I am not wholly certain an intellectual surfeit is not far worse than intellectual starvation. In the city, one hears so much, sees so much, feels so much; such a variety of impressions seize hold of one, and in a moment are chased away by new ones, that while one's powers of apprehension are quickened to a marvellous degree, one's powers of reflection are proportionally weakened from want of exercise. The memory, too, suffers constantly from being overloaded with an ill-assorted burden it cannot carry. There is no time to classify or dispose of the miscellaneous treasure, and in the confusion, it all escapes together. The loss is not felt, any more than the stream runs dry, because all the water in it, at any fixed place and time, is passed away. A new supply of the ceaseless current fills the space before we are conscious of the loss. Thus the mind is ever busy, and serves as the dim reflex of the transient present.

See my friend there, sitting in his arm-chair after breakfast, smoking his segar. He is now upon his fourth newspaper. It is his constant habit, at an expense of four hours per day, to read six newspapers in the morning and six in the evening. He is a very clever man, as the word goes; very shrewd in business, very sage in advice, very well informed, very firm in his opinions. When he has finished his sixth morning paper, I ask him, 'What is the news?' Do you think he occupies two hours in telling me? Do you think he makes some profound observation, showing he has grappled with, classified, and generalized upon the myriad facts that have passed, like images before the wizard's glass, in review before his mind? You are much deceived if you do. His answer is always the same; short, pithy, and sincere: 'Nothing.' If he answered as a philosopher, I should perhaps blame his philosophy, censure him as a cynic, but praise his sagacity. But I can do neither. What! have you toiled two hours, and found nothing worthy of recollection? Have you not been apprised of the astounding discovery made in a remote city, that government and law are useless and expensive encumbrances upon the soaring spirit of a free people; and that an impromptu Vigilance Committee' do the work cheaper and better? Have you not, too, learned this, that, and another thing?' 'Well, yes,' he does recollect something of the kind; 'but really it had escaped his memory.' And thus it is each day; and in wisdom the man grows feebler every day.

Beware of the man who reads but one book!' is the ore of an old proverb of the cloister, eliminated and refined from the dross of a mediæval Latin etymology, too barbarous to be intrusted abroad without an interpreter. A mint of wisdom lies imbedded in those profound old words; wisdom hard to learn; learned only after lapse of much time and melancholy experience; often learned too late, frequently not at all; humiliating to the pride of intellect, mortifying to ambition, even when learned in timely season. Two truths must sink deeply into the mind of

a man before he can begin to know any thing. He must be satisfied that it is impossible in one short life to learn every thing. He must be satisfied that it is possible for him to know only very little. A bitter conviction it is, when it overtakes the ambitious student, that he cannot know every thing worth knowing; that his life would be exhausted in the acquisition of a tithe of it, and no time would be left to use it. Diligence may enable him to extend his researches to very distant boundaries; untiring patience and persevering labor, coupled with good natural powers, will do wonders in the way of acquirement. But knowledge is neither research of distant boundaries, nor wonderful acquirement. They are merely the implements of knowledge. They are the source and materials. Learning supplies the mingled ingredients of the alembic of the mind; knowledge is the new form, after the process of distillation and crystallization is complete. Intellectual knowledge, like practical sagacity, is usually the acquisition of experience. The first is an ultimate growth of the mind's experience, dealing with the great recorded thoughts of men and events of the world, and nurtured amid the myriad vicissitudes that mark its own career, as the other is taught by the common events of every-day life. Knowledge is a secondary result, for which the mind is fitted to seek after and comprehend only when research and acquirement are accomplished. Until this is done, a man has neither the intellectual stores, nor the intellectual habits, nor the intellectual discipline, necessary to enable him to detect the discrepancies in seeming analogies; to discriminate between primary and secondary causes; finally, to distinguish betwixt truth and error.

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Perhaps I may seem to labor the point unnecessarily. But I think

This is a fearful mistake, this confounding acquirement with knowledge, and has occasioned the shipwreck of many a noble mind, proudly launched in an ocean of fact. All the facts in the world do not constitute the minutest infinitesimal of truth; and a man might possess his memory with all the facts in the world, and be not a whit the wiser with it all. Fact is the foundation of truth, but the superstructure scarcely betrays what sustains it. To go back to my metaphor: truth is distillation from fact. The change is chemical, not mechanical. Fact is multiform-prismatic; truth is single and hueless. Truth is a centre from which fact radiates in endless and countless rays. Truth is fixed and immutable; fact revolves about it as a common centre, and often, like the kaleidoscope, changes with every revolution, and yet is the same thing first and last. What we know of truth is, that it is the clue of all the labyrinths of nature, time, and history, and that what we can possess of it, though positively much, is comparatively nothing. Human knowledge is fragmentary; here a manifest certainty, there a probability, and elsewhere a conjecture. Perfect knowledge is the highest attribute of DEITY. So far as we progress in the pursuit of pure knowledge of truth, so far we approach DIVINITY.

If a pre-requisite to the mastery of any subject were the perusal of every thing written upon it, well might the student despair. The recorded ideas of centuries upon the simplest topics would exhaust an ordinary life-time in the perusal. The old adage, Non multa sed multum,' is in point, and is the true rule. Reading furnishes the oil to

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the lamp of thought. The lamp must be lighted and burn, or there is no light. There are,' says Sheridan, 'on every subject but a few leading and fixed ideas; their tracks may be traced by your own genius as well as by reading. A man of deep thought who shall have accustomed himself to support or attack all he has read, will soon find nothing new.' Much thinking, little reading, makes the sound reasoner. The proportion should be vastly in favor of the first, and the appetite for the latter, though stronger, will still demand and relish only substantial and nutritious food. Reading for amusement is like any other amusement, of little importance mentally, provided it amuses; the mind having an instinct in this respect, and seeking that amusement which is most beneficial as such. Reading for knowledge is hard work; it is a severe task, and inclination is not to be consulted. No rule can be laid down. One will read ten times as much as another, and each derive equal profit. It seems idle to read, except to furnish the mind food for thought, to keep it occupied; more than this not only is wasted, but overloads and incapacitates the mind for thinking. This begets inattention to facts, and inattention is followed by loss of memory, and then the very materials of thinking are gone.

Intellectual power is the offspring, result, and acquisition of close, connected, and protracted thought. Natural powers being equal, it will vary in men in proportion to this discipline of them. Thinking is the severest labor of man, yet it is the most compensating. If the mind is immortal, the laborer is working in a garden he shall always till. Labor is a 'curse;' but whosoever dares do all that does become a man,' will literallywORK out his own salvation.'

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Few men, however, in cities can be led to believe themselves capable of any continuous, sustained mental effort; fewer still have the inclination to exercise the capacity; of those who feel themselves capable and inclined, few have the energy, and fewer still find the opportunity. Amid the toil, and bustle, and noise, and confusion, and multiplicity of facts and events, passions and purposes, each succeeding the other so rapidly that before the mind can grasp one, it is gone, and another fills its place, what chance for thought? what Herculean powers of mind can hold them? what Argus eyes can discriminate which is worthy of being picked from the miscellaneous heap?

The mind fares better in the country. There are fewer subjects of contemplation. GOD and nature are ever present. Every thing is suggestive of man's littleness and brevity of existence, of nature's permanence. The timid grass bristles stoutly on the very graves of our forefathers. It is only by connecting oneself with the great human family that the aching sense of insignificance is lulled. The thoughts move thus, if they move at all, in a larger compass. There is cheerful solitude, the nurse of thought. There are fewer books and fewer men to make opinions, and so comes self-reliance, the parent of thought. If this is doubted by any citizen who fancies himself a student and a thinker, let him spend a month in the country, and, my word for it, he returns a' wiser and a sadder man;' 'wiser' for the hours consumed in reflecting upon what would have escaped his attention in the city; 'sadder,' that he was not my convert sooner.

Perhaps the chief advantages of education as a mere accomplishment

may be summed up in the two words, consistency and toleration, the two highest traits of a Christian and a gentleman; consistency in his own ideas and actions, and a wise toleration toward the ideas and actions of others. These I think may be better attained in the country than in the city. They are the result of a careful and assiduous cultivation, much silent, serious meditation, and a breadth of views only to be acquired by patient, protracted and uninterrupted thought.

Before I quit this subject, I cannot refrain from two quotations recalled by what has been written. There is one type of man that is not utterly frivolous, thus depicted by the great dramatist:

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And there is one view of this life that is not utterly insignificant, thus expressed by the greatest political thinker of the age:

As it is not a vain and false, but an exalted and religious imagination which leads us to raise our thoughts from the orb which, amid this universe of worlds, the CREATOR has given us to inhabit, and to send them, with something of the feeling which nature prompts, and teaches to be proper among children of the same ETERNAL PARENT, to the contemplation of the myriads of beings with which his goodness has peopled the infinite of space; so neither is it false and vain to consider ourselves as interested and connected with our whole race through all time; allied to our ancestors; allied to our posterity; closely compacted on all sides with others; ourselves being but links in the great chain of being, which begins with the origin of our race, runs onward through its successive generations, binding together the past, the present and the future, and terminating at last, with the consummation of all things earthly, at the throne of GOD.'

November, 1851.

THE

LAK E OF SCHROON.

On! it was a blessed morning
In the lustrous month of June,
That I wandered open-hearted

By the silent Lake of Schroon!
All its smooth, translucent harbors
Trees reflected, flowers and arbors;
Blossoms with the sands entwining,
Many fathoms deep were shining;
And the ripples, murmuring faint,
Made a melancholy plaint,
Like the prayer of holy saint.

Oh! it was a blessed morning,

When the year was in its bloom,
Wearied with this life's contention,

That I wandered by Lake Schroon!
Wandered 'neath the oaks and larches,
Dreaming 'mid their broken arches,
Dreaming on the hills of clover,
Living all my life-time over,
Till I saw the angels fair

All around me in the air,

And they smiled to see me there.

Oh! it was a blessed morning
That I wandered, filled with joy,
In that Eden of seclusion,
Open-hearted as a boy!

There the heartless swarms came never;
There the air was pure for ever;
There the forest, by GoD planted,
Seemed alive, or else enchanted,
As I lay, with half-closed eyes,

Looking, through them, through the skies,
In a kind of mute surprise!

For evermore that blessed morning
Shall re-bless me with its bloom,
Though the world has far removed me
From the silent Lake of Schroon!
Phantoms of the matted forest
Now, as then, before me soarest,
And I hear the murmuring rill
In the city murmur still.
There's a picture on the wall,
With a lake and water-fall,
And a blue sky over all.

C. N. G

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