CULTURE OF EVERY PART.

DISCUSSION.

I AM about to recommend a practice in the conduct of the understanding, which, I dare say, will be strongly objected to by men of the world, the practice of discussing. But then I have many limitations to add to such recommendation. It is as unfair to compel a man to discuss with you, who cannot play the game, or does not like it, as it would be to compel a person to play at chess with you under similar circumstances. Neither is such an exercise of the mind suitable to the rapidity and equal division of general conversation. Such practices are of course as ill-bred and as absurd as it would be to pull out a grammar and a dictionary in a general society, and to prosecute the study of a language. But when two men meet together who love truth, and discuss any difficult point with good nature and a respect for each other's understandings, it always imparts a high degree of steadiness and certainty to our knowledge; or what is nearly of equal value, it convinces us of our ignorance. It is an exercise which is

SPEECH NOT FOR ALL SUBJECTS.

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apt to degenerate into a habit of perpetual contradiction, which is the most tiresome and most disgusting in all the catalogue of imbecilities. It is an exercise which timid men dread, from which irritable men ought to abstain; but which, in my humble opinion, advances a man who is calm enough for it and strong enough for it, far beyond any other method of employing the mind. Indeed, a promptitude to discuss, is so far a proof of a sound mind, that whenever we feel pain and alarm at our opinions being questioned, it is a sign that they have been taken up without examination, or that the reasons which once determined our judgment have vanished away.

Sidney Smith.

I cannot help thinking that the candid, liberal, and easy discussion of opinions is the most rational turn that can be given to the conversation of well-educated men. This style of conversation is no doubt at first attended with great difficulties; but the whole refinement of social intercourse consists in the imposition of restraints; all improvement is nothing but the removal of obstacles.

Horner.

The presence of our fellows and the exchange of looks and words with them, are the great instruments of selfconsciousness, and are suitable for all those parts and faculties of a man which are improved by study and attention. But there are elements of our being that were

never meant for this; which change their character by being breathed upon; or which vanish in the sound that utters them.

There are things too low to be spoken of: which indeed become low by being spoken of. The appetites are of this kind. They were meant to be the beginnings of action, not the end of speech: and under the dropping of words, they are as wholesome food analyzed into constituent poisons. God lights that fire, and does not want our breath to blow it, or the fuel of our thought to feed it...

Purity of mind is forfeited, less by exceeding rules of moderation, than by needing them; - by attention to the inferior pleasures as such. There might be less of moral evil in the rude banquet of heroic times, marked perhaps by excess, but warmed by social enthusiasm, and idealized by lofty minstrelsy, than in many a meal of the prudent dietician, setting a police over his sensations and weighing out the scruples of enjoyment for his palate. Not rules of quantity, but habits of forgetfulness, constitute our emancipation from the animal nature. Most futile is the attempt to base the morality of the appetites on physiology. Let us indeed accept such help as may come from this source also; but let us rate it at its worth and assign it to its place. Good for the remedy of bodily disease, it is not good for the formation of character; and it is odious as the substitute for religion. Martineau.

There are also things too high to be spoken of: and

which cease to be high, by being made objects of ordinary speech. Language occupies the mid-region of our life, between the wants that ground us on the earth, and the affections that lift us to the skies. If we were all animal, we could not use it; if we were as God, we should give it up, and lapse, like him, into eternal silence. It is the instrument of business, of learning, of mutual understanding, of common action; the tool of the Intellect and the Will; the glory of a nature more than brutal, the mark of one less than the divine; as truly the characteristic of labor in the mind, as the sweat of the brow of the body's toil; emblem at once of blessing and of curse; recalling an Eden half remembered, while we work in the desert that can never be forgot. When we try to raise it to higher functions, it only spoils the thing it cannot speak; which becomes, like an uttered secret, a treasure killed and gone. Martineau.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day; on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish

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ENJOYMENT OF HEART AND MIND.

have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often, not as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing thought; but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. Speech is silvern, Silence is golden; or, as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence of Eternity. Carlyle.

Shut the windows that the room may be light.

Arabian Proverb.

Hardly any period of after-life is so rich in vivid and rapturous enjoyment, as that when Knowledge is first unfolding its magical prospects to a genial and ardent youth; when his eyes open to discern the golden network of thought wherein man has robed the naked limbs of the world, and to see all that he feels teeming and glowing within his breast, embodied in glorified and deathless forms in the living gallery of Poetry.

Cherish and foster that spirit of love, which lies wakeful, seeking what it may feed on, in every genial young mind; supply it with wholesome food; place an object before it worthy its embraces; else it will try to appease its cravings by lawless indulgence. What your system may be, is of minor importance: in every one, as Leibnitz says, there is a sufficiency of truth. Plunge as deep as you will into the sea of knowledge; and do not fear