THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS THE MOST

COMMON.

A

BENEFICENT Providence has ordained that

what is most essential may be most easily acquired. Health is more essential than astronomy, and therefore its laws are more easily learned. Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal. Society might subsist and enjoy a good degree of happiness without any knowledge of the learned languages, or of the higher mathematics, but it cannot endure, in any tolerable state, without honesty; and therefore honesty may be more cheaply and universally inculcated than Latin or Greek or the differential calculus. In the benign order of the creation, necessities are first provided for, embellishments, superfluities, luxuries, afterwards, if at all.

INTELLECT.

HE intellect is the light of the mind. The

THE

appetites, impulses, affections, sentiments, whatever we please to call them, have their

objects of desire; but they know not how to obtain them. The intellect points out or devises the means by which their ends can be reached. They inform the intellect what they want; the intellect

discerns and adopts the measures necessary to their gratification. The intellect performs the office of a pilot; but what shall become of the vessel and its treasures, if the pilot is blind?

A

PLEASURES OF KNOWLEDGE.

N attempt to describe the uses, pleasures,

blessings of knowledge, would be like an attempt to clasp the huge earth around in our arms; we should fail, not because there is no earth, but because of its vastness. When the Pennsylvania Dutchman said that all he wanted his boys to know was, how to count a hundred dollars and to row a boat to New Orleans, he did not think that if others had not known vastly more than this, there would have been no dollars to count, nor New Orleans to go to.

THE VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE.

HEN a ship has been driven by adverse

winds and currents until her path is wound into a coil, and crossed and tangled in inextricable confusion, it is knowledge alone which can lift the sextant to the skies, and tell, within a hand-breadth, on what spot in the waste of waters, in what direc

tion, and how far from home, the wanderer may be.

A

SKILLED LABOR.

N ancient historian relates that the mere labor

of raising the stones which compose the great pyramid of Egypt, and fastening them in their proper places, occupied one hundred thousand men for twenty years; and this number was exclusive of those who were employed in hewing and transporting the materials. It has been calculated that the same labor might be performed by thirtysix thousand men using the steam-engines of England in a single day; that is, by about one third of the number of men in less than one six-thousandth part of the time. It is true that it would cost something to build the engines, but their value would hardly be lessened by a single day's work.

THE INFINITE AND THE FINITE.

(OD can speak whatever he will into existence,

but man must work into existence whatever good he desires. And hence the necessity, not merely of a general aim or resolve to effect a noble object, but of learning or devising the means by which it can be attained.

A

HUMAN NATURE A PROBLEM.

MONG all the works of God, there is nothing

so heterogeneous and self-contradictory as the nature of man. That figment of the ancients was an inadequate, though a just representation even of a good man, which likened him to a charioteer drawn by steeds, one of whom had wings by which he would soar to heaven, while the weight of his fellow held him to the earth. Under all the influences which human art, and nature, and Providence shed around us, it is the work of education to reduce these conflicting powers to harmonious action. Let us not deny that, with the aids which Heaven vouchsafes to all who seek for them, the appetites and propensities of the young can be subjected to the restraints of reason and conscience.

D

PARENTAL INFLUENCE.

R. FRANKLIN attributed much of his practical turn of mind-which was the salient point of his immortality to the fact that his father, in his conversations before the family, always discussed some useful subject, or developed some just principle of individual or social action,

instead of talking forever about trout-catching or grouse-shooting, about dogs, dinners, dice, or trumps.

LANGUAGE.

OME languages are musical in themselves, so

SOME

that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear. Such is the Italian. Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak. Such, to a painful extent, are those of the Saxon stock, from which the greater part of our own is derived. A few poets, however, by their wonderful powers of culling and collocating, have been able to tune the jaggy hoarseness of the English throat, horrid with croak and gutturalness, into the sweet utterance of many a page of gently-flowing verse, musical with swell and cadence of melodious sounds. When the language is unmusical, the only remaining beauty with which we can invest it is that of a distinct articulation. Nothing is more painful to a cultivated and delicate ear, than the jargon which has the harshness of the adult's voice, with the inarticulateness of the infant's.