wing
dislike to all manual and merely commercial pursuits, and an over-fondness
for what are known as the learned, and more especially the literary
professions. This desire, we fear, proceeds often from a wish to avoid
labor; and, where this is the case, we can assure all such that literature
is not the sphere for indolence.

We neither impugn the honesty nor ignore the talents of the "rising
generation." We would only tender them a parting advice: Think, learn, and
act, reverently and cautiously, and in the spirit of that philosophy which
has won for England her most enduring laurels--which taught her Newton to
discard for years, until fact supported theory, what was perhaps the
broadest glimpse of truth ever vouchsafed to the human mind. Do so, as
they dread the realization of the outline drawn by the master-hand of Jean
Paul Richter--"The new-year's night of an unhappy man." His graphic picture
we hold up to the gaze of the "rising generation." The season is
appropriate. We are all fond at this time of retrospection, and are full
of resolves for the future. Perhaps we may strike some chord now in
jarring dissonance, that may yet vibrate to divinest harmony.

"An old man stood on the new-year's midnight at the window, and gazed with
a look of long despair, upward to the immovable, ever-blooming heaven, and
down upon the still, pure, white earth, on which no one was then so
joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near him; it was covered
over only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he
brought nothing with him out of the whole rich life, no thing with him,
but errors, sins, and disease, a wasted body, a desolated soul, the breast
full of poison, an old age full of remorse. The beautiful days of his
youth turned round to-day, as spectres, and drew him back again to that
bright morning on which his father first placed him at the cross-road of
life, which, on the right hand, leads by the sun-path of virtue into a
wide peaceful land full of light and of harvests, and full of angels, and
which, on the left hand, descends into the mole-ways of vice, into a black
cavern, full of down-dropping poison, full of aiming serpents, and of
gloomy, sultry vapors.

"Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the drops of poison on his
tongue. And he knew now where he was!

"Frantic, and with unspeakable grief, he called upward to Heaven, 'Oh!
give me back my youth again! O, father! place me once more at