spring out of their early feelings, their minds are still
at the mercy of fortune: they have no inward impulse steadily to propel
them: and must trust to the chances of the world for a guide. And such
is our present moral and intellectual state, that these chances are
little else than variety of danger. There will be a thousand causes
conspiring to complete the work of a false education, and by inclosing
the mind on every side from the influences of natural feeling, to
degrade its inborn dignity, and finally bring the heart itself under
subjection to a corrupted understanding. I am anxious to describe to you
what I have experienced or seen of the dispositions and feelings that
will aid every other cause of danger, and tend to lay the mind open to
the infection of all those falsehoods in opinion and sentiment, which
constitute the degeneracy of the age.

Though it would not be difficult to prove, that the mind of the country
is much enervated since the days of her strength, and brought down from
its moral dignity, it is not yet so forlorn of all good,--there is
nothing in the face of the times so dark and saddening and repulsive--as
to shock the first feelings of a generous spirit, and drive it at once
to seek refuge in the elder ages of our greatness. There yet survives so
much of the character bred up through long years of liberty, danger, and
glory, that even what this age produces bears traces of those that are
past, and it still yields enough of beautiful, and splendid, and bold,
to captivate an ardent but untutored imagination. And in this real
excellence is the beginning of danger: for it is the first spring of
that excessive admiration of the age which at last brings down to its
own level a mind born above it. If there existed only the general
disposition of all who are formed with a high capacity for good, to be
rather credulous of excellence than suspiciously and severely just, the
error would not be carried far: but there are, to a young mind, in this
country and at this time, numerous powerful causes concurring to inflame
this disposition, till the excess of the affection above the worth of
its object is beyond all computation. To trace these causes it will be
necessary to follow the history of a pure and noble mind from the first
moment of that critical passage from seclusion to the world, which
changes all the circumstances of its intellectual existence, shows it
for the first time the real scene of living