and will be, we trust, the favored means of furnishing something better than mere amusement to the minds of many, who may have been led to purchase the volume by the quaintness of its title. F. W. P. G. ART. V. THE LOVE OF EXCELLENCE, AS ONE AIM OF EDUCATION. THERE is an excellence in things material, which it befits intelligent natures to understand, to feel, and to appreciate. The outward world exhibits to the eye of man lineaments, which brute eyes distinguish not. There are relations to what is spiritual in us among the forms of gross master. We behold not only masses in juxta-position, but objects in orderly arrangement, with symmetrical proportions. There is not only magnitude, but grandeur; not only motion, but grace; not only useful adaptation, but thrilling beauty. We are made not only to receive impressions, but to analyze them; not only to perceive, but to admire. Nature is prepared to be to us something more and better than the theatre of our toil, our storehouse of implements, our granary and reservoir of animal supplies. God gave man dominion over his works, not merely that he might subjugate them to his will and pleasure, but convert them into helpful teachers and inspiring models; draw from them materials for his own intellectual creations; employ them as emblems in the contemplation of truth, and a medium of inquiry into the divine perfection. Their finite qualities were meant to aid in the development and progress of the infinite in the human soul. All men may in some degree participate in these higher uses of the external world, even without culture. The untutored ranger, who penetrates the recesses of the primeval forest, may feel the deep gloom overawe him, no less than some Minster's solemn shades may have subdued the emotions of more cultivated minds. The hunter on the Alps, or the gondolier of the lakes beneath them, may catch the letter ed traveller's enthusiasm and glow with a profounder sense of the glory and beauty of their favored regions. Images of unutterable loveliness mingle with the rude conceptions of even savage men, and the quickening power of outward nature is sometimes seen in the stirring thoughts and chivalrous adventures of minds encrusted by ignorance, and exposed to sordid and vicious associations. The claims of a spiritual birth may thus be vindicated against the most fatal influences. But this can only happen rarely. And however much may be allowed to the native sensibility of the soul, and the inherent force of the qualities which appeal to it, aside from all culture, yet by means of such culture only, can the outward universe be made tributary to the spiritual life to the extent which we ought to desire. One of the offices of a rightly conducted education is to enlarge our knowledge of nature. Another, and one equally important, is to open our hearts to its most ennobling impressions; to train us to the taste which shall appreciate the excellence that clothes the works of God. What are called the Natural Sciences, which have obtained in every period so large a share of attention, and in none more than in our own, have been valued perhaps too exclusively for the opportunities and means they may bestow for the enhancement of material wealth, the increase of national power, and the conversion of the resources of the world to the supply of animal comforts and luxuries for its inhabitants. A better claim to patronage than this might be made out for them, in behalf of the mind itself, upon whose nature and healthful activity they exert an influence for which none other could be substituted with equal effects. But then most of all, have they answered their true end, when they are auxiliaries of that higher philosophy, which concerns man as a partaker of a divine nature, the immortal child of God, who is looking for a better country, even an heavenly. It were devoutly to be wished that more of our intelligent youth were disposed to pursue the studies here alluded to, with closer reference to this, their noblest end; that it were felt to be imperative on those who have power, to acquaint themselves with God, through the medium of the laws by which he governs the universe, and by communion with him in those scenes of wonder, to which science introduces its votaries; and that it were held no venial defect in one who can boast of his conquests in the pursuit of knowledge, to be destitute of a taste for the sub limity and beauty, which gild every height where Truth has a temple, and embellish all the avenues to her secret springs. The formation of such a taste is commended to the young mind by every motive which is most felt by generous natures. It were worth all the pains that it may require, were it only for the heightened interest which it lends to common objects, and to the aspect of things by which one must needs be every where surrounded. The dull realities, of which complaint is made, would be far more rare, if charms which really exist in our most ordinary walks were not, for want of a right taste, overlooked or despised. The feeling, which prompts the humblest peasant to erect a trellis for the woodbine by his cottage door, is no less true to nature and no less richly recompenced in its kind, than the more costly provision, in which the affluent man of cultivated mind indulges his refined tastes. Both consult well for their happiness in uniting the beautiful to the useful. But the taste of which we are speaking, makes its value apparent in many other ways besides this of heightening the interest of common objects and scenes. It enlarges the sphere of intellectual activity, and multiplies greatly the desirable ends of living. The mind which it inspires has more food and incitement for thought. Its faculties are quickened by more impulses and of a nobler kind. Change of place produces no suspension of intellectual employment, though it cause an interruption to all customary studies and pursuits. Wherever the lover of nature may go, there will be enough to keep all his powers in agreeable as well as necessary activity, in those contemplations for which his peculiar taste inclines. Every where there is an impress of the perfection which it is his joy to trace. No landscape so bare but it offers some delicate lineament; no region so waste as not to have some fragment of a beautiful form. Sooner may the pleased eye weary of beholding, than any province of nature cease to supply new objects fit to win and to reward attention, to put the mind upon thinking, and make thought a vehicle of enjoyment. Besides the value which a cultivated taste derives from its power to remove wearisomeness and prevent vacuity in the intellectual life, there is that which is given it by its efficiency in charming away or greatly mitigating the sorrows incident to every condition. The poor man obtains many a time oblivion of the privations which mark his lot, at no more cost, than VOL. XXIII. 3D S. VOL. V. NO. II. 28 the opening upon him, on his toilsome way, of some scene, lit up with a sudden splendor and beauty by nature's hand, and made to quicken in his heart the hope of a heaven for the poor in spirit. Thus has he a harvest from fields he neither owns nor tills, which their affluent possessor might be glad, at any price, to purchase. This title to the common heritage of nature's loveliness and grandeur, a domain which no walls can fence about, and in which no proprietary has exclusive right of appropriation, helps to settle balances and cure heart-aches arising out of the inequality of material wealth. And in this inalienable reserve, which can be taken from him by no creditor and be swallowed up by no flood of disasters, how much has the opulent man, whom his riches have forsaken, to abate the painful sense of his loss, to preserve the capacity and afford the means of enjoyment in the very midst of the depressing and disheartening influences inseparable from such a failure of the resources on which he has been accustomed to rely. A like solace in other modes of suffering will the mind almost involuntarily experience, which has been imbued with tastes prepared to discern and appreciate the beautiful and the good wherever they appear. To such a mind, when society, business, and most of the ordinary pursuits and pleasures of life are irksome and not in harmony with it, nature opens a welcome covert and asylum. There it is beguiled insensibly from sad meditation, refreshed in the outpouring of its griefs by an influence in which there is no harshness, and which yet is felt as if it were the sway of God's own authority. There truth wears the benignant aspect which beams on nature's brow, and is fraught with the motherly tenderness which broods in her silent breast. The objects which were wont to address to taste a never rejected appeal, seem to look up into the eye of sorrow like sympathetic, living comforters. Artless and unobtrusive, with none of the show of a contrivance and a purpose to console, which so often defeat the aims and efforts of other comforters, these have a way of winning access to the wounded spirit, which secures a restorative effect, when no thought of such a thing has sprung up there. That fatal feeder of malign melancholy, idle and listless acquiescence in affliction, refusing occupation as what implies something sacrilegious, and a doing of cruel violence to the best affections, is met in nature by some of the persuasives to employment, and by a kind of occupation, most of all calculated to engage attention, and to move effectually toward the desirable result of healthful, consolatory action. Nor let it be forgotten that a devotional spirit and those religious exercises of the heart, which are the chief alleviations to its distresses, are so in unison with the pure tastes which draw to the study and enjoyment of nature, as to combine with these for the relief of the mind without any jarring as of incompatible things, and so as to allow the feeling that the just demands of every affection are left sacredly untouched, when the mind has strayed from the scene of its affliction among the soothing influences of the outward creation, as when it has gone up to the house of God in acknowledgment and for prayer. On this part of our subject we may not longer dwell. What better can we do to impress what we have been saying, than repeat the testimony and the tribute of one who knew and felt it all. It is that of Wordsworth on revisiting the banks of Wye, a spot endeared to him for its poetical inspirations and many a youthful joy. 66 Though absent long These forms of beauty have not been to me "Nature never did betray the heart, There is an excellence of things intellectual, in the fruits and productions of human genius, the labors and achieve |