voted to the winter previous; and the usual harbingers of advancing
warmth--the small singing birds and northern flowers--were present ere
we were well aware of their welcome appearance.

Hope is a flower that fills the sentient mind
With sweets of rapturous and of heavenly kind;
And those, who in her gardens love to tread,
Alone can tell how soft the odors spread.

HETHERWOLD.

_April 20th_. "There are, it may be," says Paul, "many kinds of voices
in the world, and none of them is without signification." It could
easily be proved that many of these voices are very rude; but it would
take more philological acumen than was possessed by Horne Tooke to prove
that any of them are without "signification." By the way, Tooke's
"Diversions of Purley" does not seem to me so odd a title as it
once appeared.

C. writes to me, under this date, "I pray you to push your philological
inquiries as far as possible; and to them, add such views as you may be
able to collect of the various topics embraced in my plan."

There is, undoubtedly, some danger that, in making the Indian history
and languages a topic of investigation, the great practicable objects of
their reclamation may be overlooked. We should be careful, while
cultivating the mere literary element, not to palliate our delinquencies
in philanthropic efforts in their behalf, under the notion that nothing
can be effectively done, that the Indian is not accessible to moral
truths, and that former efforts having failed of general results, such
as those of Eliot and Brainerd, they are beyond the reach of _ordinary_
means. I am inclined to believe that the error lies just here--that is,
in the belief that some extraordinary effort is thought to be necessary,
that their sons must be cooped up in boarding-schools and colleges,
where they are taught many things wholly unsuited to their condition and
wants, while the mass of the tribes is left at home, in the forests, in
their ignorance and vices, untaught and neglected.

In the exemplification of St. Paul's idea, that all languages are given
to men, with an exact significance of words and forms, and therefore not
vaguely, there is the highest warrant for their study; and the time thus
devoted cannot be deemed as wasted or thrown away. How shall a man say
"raca," or "that fox," if there be no equivalents for the words in
barbarous languages? The truth is that this people find no-difficulty in
expressing the exa