accustomed to thinking. Under the reign of the thoughtful Numa, Rome flourished; under that of his less thoughtful successor, Tullus, she declined. Augustus Cæsar was a man of thought, and under him the Roman people prospered; but Caligula was a weak-minded slave to his passions, and in his reign proved himself to be, as history has it, "a serpent to the Romans." To be thoughtful is to be better-hearted and noblerminded. What is heathenism but that state of humanity in which the minds of men are most thoughtless? Thinking is a process of purification. If you review your experience but a little way, you will see that your best days-those which you revert to with the liveliest pleasure were days of high mental activity. From the exercise of hard, victorious thinking, a man comes away always with a dignified satisfaction. It does not take long for a soul that has been well disciplined to thought to withdraw itself from all worldly and sensual influences. With an extraordinary ease and freedom it passes into moods of serene abstraction. The flesh seems rarely in disturbing proximity to its harmonious workings. Bodily infirmities scarcely ever depress it. Its powers move on smoothly and beautifully in spite almost of disease itself. Every passion within it is hushed and held in complete abeyance. Not one ever frets long at control. In the world of the spirit all is clear, genial, exhilarant weather. No clouds roll up there to darken the skies; no storms gather to lash the heavens with lightning. The man of thought moves through the walks of society with an impressive stateliness and composure. The empty baubles of pleasure, after which other men chase and pant, have no enchantment to him. He looks at the throngs of little-souled men around him, sweating after short-lived laurels and fortunes, and smites upon them as they pass him by. He pities them for their follies, and weaknesses, and woes. He pities them in their sad bondage to vice and fashion. They know not the secret of ignoring their misfortunes, and trials, and pains as he does. They have never learned how to triumph over the world, the flesh, and the devil as does he. His presence among them is silent often, but not always. He seeks occasions for benefiting them, for raising them to a higher life. And hence it is, that the masses have, in every age, had a chosen number of gifted orators to stir and sway them with persuasive extemporary eloquence. Such was Demosthenes; such was Henry; such was Webster. It was not mere popular fame that these men sought. They were above that sickly yearning for demagogue notoriety, by which most partisan orators are governed. Neither did they seek for wealth. They were comparatively poor men, though they might have died millionaires. They were men of more soul than body. Their minds had been inured to deep and constant thought. By long and indefatigable thinking they had conquered their own infirmities, risen triumphant over the lower passions and propensities of human nature, and acquired such a power and sublimity of soul that they could, at any moment, dazzle their hearers like midday suns. In no other way can you explain the secret of a man's being able to enravish listening hosts of men, with unpremeditated eloquence, than on the supposition of a full, complete control, at any time, over his whole being. None but the thinker can be richly and persuasively eloquent. There are so many influences growing out of public occasions, to scatter and confuse the thoughts of the orator; such a variety of mind, waiting to be satisfied, within the compass of his voice and vision; such a deep sense often of the greatness of the interests at stake; and such an embarrassing misgiving and fearfulness, lest there may be a failure, that it must be utterly beyond the capacity of most men to sustain their minds in that composure and self-possession which are so essential to success before great audiences. It is only the man whose mental powers have been long broken and trained to close, rigorous thought, that need ever hope to be able to charm the masses and wield them at will with his words. While other men faint and reel under the weight of the moment and the scene, such a man stands up erect, calm, and contemplative, as if he looked upon his countless hearers as but a collection of pigmies, any one of whom he might dandle upon the palm of his hand, or strike dumb with one thunder-peal of his mighty voice. But, again: the thinker possesses that within him which makes him, under all circumstances, a companion to himself. Most men have a strange dread of solitude. They start back, at the very sound of the word, with a thrill of horror. Any thing to them but seclusion! You could not inflict a severer punishment upon any one of this class of persons than to put him or her, for a short period, aloof from the noisy marts and thoroughfares of business, where hurrying, panting men are ever jostling against one another in pursuit of what they fancy to be pleasure, wealth, or fame. They are stark alone when left alone. Now, this is not the case with the thinking man. To him every day of a retreat into the world of woods and rural domes- Cervantes wrote the first part of his Don Quixote. Locke's great work on the Understanding was written while he was in banishment in Holland; and Spinoza wrote his Exposition of Descartes in exile at Hague. Our philanthropic countryman, Horace Greeley, has written no letter from across the ocean like that he penned during his recent short reclusion within the walls of a Parisian prison. Many a man has thus learned the noblest lessons of what his own mind can do during brief lapses of time, when, from the sheer loss of all other companionship, he was constrained to be a companion to himself. Greatminded men soon come to be almost constantly alone with themselves. They are not long in learning that days spent in solitude are the festal days of the soul. If you notice you will find that all our chosen authors have been more or less solitary men. Cowper, from long retirement, had acquired such a love of nature that he even felt unwilling to number among his friends the man who would intentionally crush an innocent worm. What ardent lovers of solitude were Gray and Thompson! Bayard Taylor has a remarkable passion for solitary ranging. The late luscious poem of Bryant entitled, "Robert Lincoln," not to speak of numerous others from his pleasant pen, breathing the same love of nature's symphonious repose, fully attests how strongly he is attached to the bird-haunted solitudes. Emerson, too, is passionately fond of rural serenity. And how often have I pictured to my mind our own dear Washington Irving, in those still retreats, here and there, over the wide world, where his nimble pen has written so many genial words to rejuvenate the great heart of humanity! To the thinker every thing in the domain of nature seems to be communicative of an interesting experience. There is nothing but has a tongue to tell him something new and surprising. He holds converse with shrubs and flowers, brooks and cataracts, birds and fishes. The poet-that inspired thinker-aims to give us, in his glowing numbers, a translation of the myriad languages of natural objects. It is the principal part of his mission to write the lives and interpret the utterances of things and beings, which, to the generality of mankind, have no distinguishable animation or speech, but which, to him, are the shining, throbbing, eloquent "sons of heaven." The poet is also a sort of eclectic historian of nature. He gleans up the fragmentary inscriptions left behind, by ten thousand little and great, ephemeral and long-lived existences, and presents them to us as records of what It was in a like temporary sequestration that they were, what they did, and what they suffered, uality-the out-strugglings and out-blossomings of invisible charms. It was no doubt a perception of the infinite purity and harmony of the being of Deity, as made known in the objective existences around him, that led Socrates, in that prayer which will be as immortal as his name, to plead for "the interior beauty of the soul." In the light of the philosophy of the beautiful, as thus set forth, we can catch a glimpse of the splendid fortunes, which it is the privilege of the man of thought to lay hold of and call his own. The thinker possesses more of the earth than any other man. Croesus was not so rich as he. The Rothschilds are not so rich as he. He has property in all property, riches in all riches. He can say to the forests, "Much of these is mine," and to the fields of waving grain, "I have wealth here." He has possessions which other men are too poor to purchase. All the objects of creation are engaged to contribute precious wealth into his hands daily and hourly. Every tree he passes beckons him to stop and take its glittering earn in their day and generation. For, as Emerson has prettily expressed it, "All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches in the mountain, the river its channel in the soil, the animal its bones in the stratum, the fern and leaf their modest epitaphs in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone; not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself on the memories of its followers and in his own face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signa- | tures, and every object is covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent." There can be no traceable boundaries to the field of him who undertakes the work of gathering together and translating into symbols intelligible to mankind, these bright, instructive, and often extraordinary autographs, stamped, here and there, on the tablets of the great book of creation, by innumera-ings; every morning sun asks him to stand still ble entities of all names and natures, motions and magnitudes, each in its own simple, rich, uncorrupted vernacular. It is in this sympathetic intimacy with natural objects as if each one had a life and individuality of its own, yet was predestined by the Father of all things to be the revealer of some attribute or the subserver of some purpose of his, that a man comes to be perpetually conscious of the universal presence, and deeply reverent of the awful majesty of God. The so-called spiritual theory of the beautiful, proposed by Schelling and elaborated by Hegel, of Germany, and which has been adopted by many if not most metaphysicians of the present age, holds that every beautiful object is an embodiment or representative of something harmonious and charming in spirit. Thus we call the crystal an object of beauty, because it sym-coverers, writers, and orators-have been what bolizes a certain spiritual order and preparation. The weeping willow is beautiful, because it symbolizes the tender disheartenment and serene thoughtfulness of grief. And the features of the human face, if beautiful at all, are of all objects the most beautiful, because they contain, in their expression, the deepest tokens of inward intelligence and amiability. and receive its outpouring of radiant gold. What care could such a man have for that perishable material which the world calls wealth? How contemptible to him must seem the panting of poor, niggardly, muck-worm men after pelf to hoard away in coffers and banks! To his ear there comes an echo of pitiable poverty in the very jingle of dollars and cents. He would fain trample under his feet, for very scorn, the miser's money. Every bank note partakes, by association, so much of all that is unmanly, and corrupt, and satanic, in the disguise of human flesh, as to have to him scarcely the attraction which is borrowed from the fact of its being a useful instrument for gratifying laudable desire. And this is the one great reason why nearly all the magnanimous and noble men of the world-dis the masses call poor. They were poor, because they refused to make themselves rich as did other men. They chose to struggle upward rather than downward, heavenward rather than dustward. The same reason explains how it has happened that all those individuals who have had vast fortunes left them by ancestors that were millionaires and misers, but who were themselves gifted by nature and polished by education to such a degree as to have the power of perceiving what poverty all such riches are, compared with the enduring riches of thought, have poured out their wealth like water in self-sacrificing efforts to elevate, improve, and bless their Just so all beautiful objects are conceived to be bright hints of something interesting in the experience or nature, either of the soul of man or of the soul of God. The dew-drop and the rainbow, the pebble and the pearl, the colors of the spectrum and the forms of the kaleidoscope are only the visible symbols of an exalted spirit-race. You will notice that the burden of what we have said thus far, in this essay, has been to make clear the point that no individual can be truly dignified and manly till he has come to be an babitual thinker. It remains for us now to add a few words concerning the proper mode of acquiring the habit of close and penetrating thought. We remark, then, that the only true mode of learning to think is to educate the mind. Under the term educate, here used, we mean to embrace no more than the strict Latin structure of the word will warrant. To wake up the dormant powers of the soul and put them in healthy action is what we understand to be the genuine process of education. Hence, in our colleges and seminaries of learning there are, or ought to be, a thousand lessons taught and learned, for which no direct demand will ever be made in practical life. The aim and end of every true school is to cultivate habits of hard thinking. You greatly mistake if you hold to a different doctrine from this. The value of one's knowledge is almost nothing compared with that of the discipline acquired in gaining it. Education is, in many respects, a losing rather than a laying up process. The completest of students must, in time, forget the details of all that he has pored over and recited about. Those who have been close students know the effect of even a few days on their garnered crops of intellectual grain. The smaller kernels, despite the most patient care, will get out of sight and be lost. And well enough they may be, for we have but few uses to put them to in life. It is the discipline we want to keep, not the details. Every skillful boxer must have dealt out many a forgotten blow in disciplinary fisticuffs. Every good shoemaker must have once made shoes for experiment's sake, which he kept no account of. No polished scholar knows all he has ever learned. The greatest men are not those who have accumulated the most learning, but those who, by long and laborious mental schooling, have acquired the readiest control over their powers of mind. We need not get nervous when we see that much of what we learned in our algebra and geometry, our calculus and mechanics, is already dim and evanishing. It is enough for us to know that we once marched over these mathematical empires, conquering, Alexanderlike, all the difficulties that opposed our progress. In this knowledge we have, and will always have, the evidence of what we are, inherently and potentially. We have in it something to lean back upon, in those days of self-distrust and humiliation, when nothing within us seems strong but memory. Habits of close, deep, and original thinking, then, are the sum and substance of what the scholar should aim at and struggle after at school. He should not go there for knowledge merely. His education will be a failure if he does. Knowledge could be acquired without a four years' exile at college, if that were the whole of a man's education. It could be acquired in any old building in the city or country, where there is a library of miscellaneous books. A mere stuffing of the mind is no more an education than a miser is a man. We are aware that it is not permitted all to enjoy the advantages of a collegiate education. Many there are who, if they would be men at all, must, from their circumstances in life, be content to be self-made men. And to such, of course, the only hope of becoming habituated to sound and successful thinking, must be by way of unremitting exercise of mind, in close observation of men and things, patient, persevering study of profound works, and in frequent attempts at vigorous analytic and synthetic disquisition. Any thing and every thing that will make the mind more strong and self-reliant should be seized and put to service with an insatiable avidity; and all that will weaken and scatter its powers should be shunned with distrustful circumspection. The books read should be few and well chosen. Those myriad productions that are flying through the land on pinions of tinsel, with more sentences in them than thoughts, more paper than pith, should be suffered to pass by unnoticed. If they yield any benefit at all it can only be to those whose minds are too imbecile for any nourishment less diluted with the weak water of sentimentality. And one sure token of a man's having acquired a healthy relish for strong thought will be his growing dull and somnolent over all such vacant volumes. Books compactly written and thoughtfreighted should make up the library of him who aims to be a deep and manly thinker. BE CAREFUL OF YOUR TEMPER. HE that flings the colorings of a peevish temper on things around him, will overlay with it the most blessed sunshine that ever fell on terrestrial objects, and make them reflect the hues of his his own heart; whereas he whose soul flings out of itself the sunshine of a benevolent disposition, will make it gild the darkest places with a heavenly light. Think of this, ye who would be happy yourselves and make others so. OVERSIGHT AND RESTRAINT OF CHILDREN. to be doubted that excessive anxiety about the lives and limbs of children, amounting, as it often does, to a sinful distrust, or non-recognition, cheruberant not to his case, is need pruning; too rampant not to require training and keeping-in. Yet restraint should not be too rigorous. Besides that the sense of freedom is one of the most delightful feelings to the child, and to the man, it is favorable to virtue, and ought for that reason to be allowed within all safe and wholesome limits. Many an instance of concealment, falsehood, truantship, obduracy, and eventual lawlessness, has been owing to an over-stringent domestic supervision; though I do not doubt that the far more common origin of such mischiefs is a too great laxness of supervision. There is a medium between austerity and laxness, and between servitude and licentiousness, which you will easily discern. Liberty itself, true liberty, is a medium condition; and such liberty is favorable to virtue, while slavery is its blight, as all history shows. Just now the nations are throwing off the shackles of their old feudal despotisms, and proclaiming liberty; and we look for their corresponding advancement in intelligence and moral worth. A degree of licentiousness may be the first effect; but if licentiousness gives scope and currency to vice for time, despotism begets, nurses, and perpetuates it. A too minute and constant supervision not only tries the temper of the child, but is unfavorable to the formation of a strong and useful character. If you direct him in every effort, call him back from every ramble, question every absence from your sight, apprise him of every little danger, contrive all his amusements for him, in a word, if you keep him every moment in leading strings and tethers, you will make a feeble and dependent creature of him. An English writer says, he was once present when an old mother, who had brought up a large family with eminent success, was asked by a young one what she would reoommend in the case of some children who were too anxiously educated, and her reply was, "I think, my dear, a little wholesome neglect." Much must be left to the spontaneous impulses of the child's nature-to his natural love of achievement and of self-reliance and self-approbation, to his conscious bravery, his instinct of self-preservation, and the teachings of experience. Much also must be left to the providence of God. Do we forget that our heavenly Father unites with us in caring for our children; and with an eye that never is averted from them, and never sleeps? It is a needful relief of mind to commit them to his keeping; aud, moreover, it is hardly away. A mother at meeting on Sunday recollected a tub of water into which her little child might fall and be drowned. The thought gave her so much uneasiness that she could not attend to the services. She left the house and went home. The child was safe and well in the care of the person that had been intrusted with it. She took a book, therefore, and sat down to read; but by and by, missing her child, she went to look for it, and found it drowned in the tub. UNWRITTEN POETRY. AR down in the depths of the human heart, FAR there is a fountain of pure and hallowed feeling, from which, at times, wells up a tide of emotions which words are powerless to expresswhich the soul alone can appreciate. Full many a heart overflowing with sublime thoughts and holy imaginings, needs but "the pen of fire" to hold enraptured thousands in its spell. The "thoughts that breathe" are there, but not the "words that burn." Nature's own inspiration fills the heart with emotions too deep for utterance, and the poetry of the heart lies forever concealed in its own mysterious shrine. It is not he alone whose pen may paint with matchless skill the glories of a sunset scene, or trace the beauties of a summer landscape, that appreciates these beauties; their influence is felt, more powerfully, perhaps, by another, who can only "be silent and adore." Go stand by the thundering cataract, gaze into the deep abyss, and listen to "the sound of many waters," as they plunge into the flood below. Canst thou express thy thoughts? Listen to the crashing thunders, watch the gathering storm as it journeys "up the cloudy steep of heaven," the lightning's vivid flash, the wrath of the elements, and the conflicting powers of the air; be silent-it is the voice of God. The storm passes; the lightnings cease their fiery play; the thunder's voice is hushed; the sun appears, and the "bow of promise" hangs upon the dark cloud of wrath, the hand of Mercy stretched forth to stay the sword of Justice. Can the sublimity of the contrast be expressed? Is not here poetry that the soul alone can read? Unwritten poetry! It is stamped upon the broad, blue sky-it twinkles in every star. It mingles in the ocean's swelling surge, and glitters in the dew-drop that gems the lily's bell. It |