Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby bed
Was prowled round by the Injun's cracklin' tread,
An' who grewst strong thru' shifts, and wants, an' pains.
Nursed by stern men, with empires in their brains!
Another sweet poet has sung:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
There can be no question that wealth is fast accumulating. Let fathers,
and mothers, and preceptors spur the rising generation to that love of
accuracy, of "right dress," as the soldiers say, which puts each man in
his place, certain to stay there as long as he has agreed to, and
certain to act when the fitting time arrives.
THE ORGAN AND ITS PIPES AND REEDS.
Perhaps I can impress the true necessity of discipline no more forcibly
than by comparing society to a grand organ upon which the Creator sounds
his mighty fugue of years. We are the pipes--some the colossal columns
which shake the world, and others the tiny tubes which make a feeble
cry, almost unheard. No one of us must sound his note save in that
proper place and at that proper time which Duty indicates. We mar a
perfect harmony by ill-tempered silence, and perhaps ruin the labors of
our associates by a continuous sounding of our own ridiculous reed.
WHEREVER WE ARE
In the factory, the counting house, the workshops of the grand
industries,--or on the broad acres which watch so fondly for the sun,
let us be careful, when there is a troubling jar, a fatal discord, that
our key is not the guilty one.
BOOKS.
--Books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.--Wordsworth.
By the aid of books we multiply our sensations a
million-fold. Often the reader actually feels what he reads. Such
impressions would perhaps never have fallen to his lot in the ordinary
way of getting experience. Our indebtedness, then, to the art of
printing, is perhaps greater than to any other of the remarkable
discoveries which have lent enduring charms to human life. And yet, with
all its progress, the book-reading world is still in its infancy. The
people do not read half enough, they do not discriminate wisely between
good reading and indifferent reading, and they read too much matter of
an ephemeral nature, little calculated to be of the slightest benefit to
them a we
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