with cool watchfulness on the struggles of his youthful pupil, will see
him lie floundering in the mire, or perishing in the deep water. He must
retrace his own steps, take him by the hand, and sustain him, till he is
passed the dangerous and slippery paths of youth. He must become as a
little child to the young and frail being committed to his care, and
whose welfare and safety depend (in great measure) upon him. A cold and
unloving admiration never will produce imitation: it is like the
hopeless love of poor Helena:--

'Twere all as one as I should love a bright particular star!

Here, then, the conventual spirit has been in injurious operation;--no
less so on other points.

This conventual prejudice has banished from our school-rooms the name of
love, and presented to their youthful inmates fragments instead of
books, cramped and puny publications instead of the works of
master-spirits, lest the mind should be contaminated by any allusion to
that passion contained in them. The wisdom of such a proceeding is much
upon a par with that which devoted the feet to stocks and the shoulders
to backboards, in order to make them elegant, and denied them heaven's
air and active exercise through care for their health. The result, in
the one case as in the other, is disease and distortion. Nature will
assert her rights over the beings she has made; and she avenges, by the
production of deformity, all attempts to force or shackle her
operations. The golden globe could not check the expansive force of
water; equally useless is it to attempt any check on the expansive force
of mind,--it will ooze out! We ought long ago to have been convinced
that the only power allowed to us is the power of direction. If one-half
the amount of effort expanded to useless endeavours to cramp and check,
had been turned towards this channel, how different would be the
results! It is true that it is easier to check than to guide,--to fetter
than to restrain; and that to attempt to remove evil by the
first-occurring remedy is a natural impulse. But a pause should by made,
lest in applying the remedy a worse evil be not engendered. Distorted
spines and "pale consumptions," the result of the one mistake, are
trifling evils, when compared with the moral evils resulting from the
other. For if, as is affirmed, no education can be good which does not
bear upon future duties, how can that be wise which keeps love and its
temptations, maternity and its resp