in chains Truth, her beautiful and
modest captive. The one makes her salutation with a discourse of ease,
pleasure, freedom, and domestic tranquillity; or, if she invite to
labour, it is labour in the busy and beaten track, with assurance of the
complacent regards of parents, friends, and of those with whom we
associate. The promise also may be upon her lip of the huzzas of the
multitude, of the smile of kings, and the munificent rewards of senates.
The other does not venture to hold forth any of these allurements; she
does not conceal from him whom she addresses the impediments, the
disappointments, the ignorance and prejudice which her follower will
have to encounter, if devoted, when duty calls, to active life; and if
to contemplative, she lays nakedly before him a scheme of solitary and
unremitting labour, a life of entire neglect perhaps, or assuredly a
life exposed to scorn, insult, persecution, and hatred; but cheered by
encouragement from a grateful few, by applauding conscience, and by a
prophetic anticipation, perhaps, of fame--a late, though lasting,
consequence. Of these two, each in this manner soliciting you to become
her adherent, you doubt not which to prefer; but oh! the thought of
moment is not preference, but the degree of preference; the passionate
and pure choice, the inward sense of absolute and unchangeable devotion.

I spoke of a few simple questions. The question involved in this
deliberation is simple, but at the same time it is high and awful; and I
would gladly know whether an answer can be returned satisfactory to the
mind. We will for a moment suppose that it can not; that there is a
startling and a hesitation. Are we then to despond,--to retire from all
contest,--and to reconcile ourselves at once to cares without a generous
hope, and to efforts in which there is no more moral life than that
which is found in the business and labours of the unfavoured and
unaspiring many? No. But if the inquiry have not been on just grounds
satisfactorily answered, we may refer confidently our youth to that
nature of which he deems himself an enthusiastic follower, and one who
wishes to continue no less faithful and enthusiastic. We would tell him
that there are paths which he has not trodden; recesses which he has not
penetrated; that there is a beauty which he has not seen, a pathos which
he has not felt, a sublimity to which he hath not been raised. If he
have trembled because there has occasionally take