cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas from the brain
Of Demons?
Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first.

Man must grow

not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity.

Blessings upon all the books that are the delight of childhood and youth
and unperverted manhood! Precious are the sympathetic tears which dim
the page and which it is so wholesome to encourage in early life as a
check to the growth of selfishness and egoism. 'Who,' writes George
Sand, in her 'Lettres d'un Voyageur,' 'does not remember with delight,
the first books which he relished and devoured? Has never an old dusty
cover of some volume found upon the shelves of a neglected closet,
brought back to your mind the lovely pictures of early years? Are you
not again, in fancy, seated in the green meadow bathed in the evening
sunlight, where you read it for the first time?'

What galleries of sweet, pathetic, inspiriting, and noble pictures, have
been prepared for the modern child!--pictures, which time and all the
damp and cold of after life cannot obscure, to those who have enjoyed
them. And to what a goodly company is it the privilege of childhood and
youth, and early manhood, to be admitted!--the immortal offspring of
cheerful genius, whose companionship expands and strengthens and
purifies the heart.

But the young are lamentably debarred, in these days of excessive, and
non-educating, learning, from the wholesome influences, wholesome, in
the way of inducing sympathy, enthusiasm, and a play of the imagination,
which the best books of the past and of the present might exert upon
them. Their school tasks and examinations absorb all their time, and the
accompanying worry about 'marks,' saps their minds--'Death loves a
_shining_ mark.'

Later on, in the higher schools, colleges, and universities, there is no
time for _communion_ with great authors. The reading which is done, is
largely perfunctory. Speaking from my own long experience, I do not
think that one out of twenty of university students, even of those who
elect courses in English Literature, has read and assimilated the works
of any one good author, or any single work. This is a statement based on
an exceptionally long experience. Many have studied literature, as the
phrase goes, but have no literary education, however well they may have
'passed' in the kind of work done. And suc