The young man's honest and heart-felt account of himself was calculated to make one pause. Here was a high-toned and vigorous mind wearing away its energies, and narrowing its scope of vision, under the bondage of that public opinion respecting true learning, which took its rise and its form in the cells of the monastery, where the mind will seize upon any aliment rather than prey upon itself, and expend itself upon trifles, because it is shut away from the _great_ realities of life. A mind which was made to display its energies in the highest track of thought, and on the widest field of action, is imprisoned to count its beads, and mutter its task, in the temple of monastic lore. Public opinion must be subjected to frequent revision--let us not be pronounced radical--or errors will cling to the community, with the tendency of a mill-stone about the neck. An error, hallowed by strong and widely-connected associations, is not easily exterminated. It passes on unharmed by those agitations which overwhelm the errors of a lower grade and humbler origin; and while the generation living in its shadow have never known the light which it intercepts, they regard it as a part of the system of things, and one of the conditions of their being. Thus has the high regard which mankind accord to mental efforts, as distinguished from physical, had the effect to hallow even the follies of intellect, and to prolong the existence of those errors respecting the cultivation of the mind, which lead us to regard it rather as a receptacle of hoarded knowledge, than as a thing of active powers; to seek the acquisitions of the scholar as valuable in themselves, rather than as giving scope and expansion to the energies of a noble existence, and in the high estimation which Education has properly imparted to the _means_ of education, to make that mistake which comprehends so many others; to make the means the end.
THE violet peeps from its emerald bed, And rivals the azure in hue overhead; To the breeze, sweeping by on invisible wings, Its gift of rich odor the young lily flings, And the silvery brook in the greenwood is heard Sweetly blending its tones with the song of the bird.
The swallow is dipping his wing in the tide, And the aspect of earth is to grief unallied; Ripe fruit blushes now on the strawberry vine, And the trees of the woodland their arms intertwine; Forming shields which the sun pierceth not with his ray-- Screening delicate plants from the broad eye of day.