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individual mind by the same labored investigations through which others have passed. All the labors of all the learned have not been able to construct "a royal road" to education. The son must toil as the father did, with no inheritance but an example of diligence, and a patrimony, it may be, of the means of education. Some books are like some patent machines they injure the fibre of the material and weaken the fabric. They attempt too much in an attempt to supercede the activity of the intelligent agent. Such are the books which have nothing for the student to do, but attempt to do every thing for him. This will bring the same results in intellectual as in physical education. The editions of the classics by Anthon, for instance, are generally excluded from the colleges as text-books, not because they are not able, learned, valuable to the scholar, but because they help too soon and too much, and prevent those habits of investigation which are necessary to mental development, strength and discipline.

The class of aids just mentioned, some of them may be made of great value, but not to the student at college. In our country, where education is designed to

prepare youth for business rather than for literary life, the college studies are apt to be relinquished when the professional studies are assumed. The reason is that we are a fast age and must go ahead. If, however, the student when he leaves college and enters on the study of law, or medicine, or theology, would carry with him all his college classics, and add to them all the books of reference which could aid him in the review of those classics, he would read Homer, Virgil and Cicero through life with increasing facility and pleasure. Daniel Webster was greatly familiar through life with Homer and Virgil and Cicero-partly by a critical study of the text, and partly by the aid of the elegant paraphrases of the two formed by Pope and Dryden. Edward Everett and perhaps Rufus Choate have been always classical students in every stage of life, and the written productions of these three great men, and of such men will be found in all time among the leading English classics, while the splendid orations of mere politicians will pass into oblivion, superceded by a new supply of the same sort for school-boy declalamation.

TO MY COUSIN NANNIE.

BY A. F. HARVEY.

Wilt thou be mine? mine and forever,

Mine in the bonds Death only can sever; Mine when I walk with the good and the great, And triumphs rehearse ;

Mine, though I move in an humble estate

Mine, "for better, for worse?"

Wilt thou be mine, love? give me thy beauty, Trust me thine honor, yield me thy duty; Mine, with the riches of earth round me spread; Or, happiness surer,

Mine when the sweat of my brow gives me breadMine "for richer, for poorer?"

Wilt thou be mine, love? trusting and loving,
Love for dear Love's sake, neither reproving?

Mine when the body is writhing in pain,

And death comes by stealth:

Mine, when the strength of my youth comes again— Mine "in sickness and health?"

Wilt thou be mine, love? all mine, my treasure, Mine to make sorrow's cup one of pleasure; Mine, in the heart's holy depths to enshrine, And guard though I perish;

Mine to do battle for-evermore mine

"To love and to cherish."

Wilt thou be mine, love? mine in thy meekness,
Mine in thy strength, and mine in thy weakness;

Mine as the holiest gift that our God

To man hath e'er given;

Mine to bear with me, in patience, His rod

Mine to lead me to Heaven?

VIRGINIA GIRLS AND GALLANTS FOUR SCORE YEARS AGO.

BY J. E. C.

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It is no slight pleasure to relinquish for a time the heated confines of the city, and take refuge in the cool retreats of the summer land;-to leave behind all the bustle and the worry of "affairs," the clash and jar of conflicting passions and desires: and there, where the musical winds laugh onward through the waving foliage of ancient woods, drink in at every pore the fresh pure life of country haunts, whose silence and repose are never broken by the din of trade,-the eternal struggle of the great world.

At such times, and in spots like this, the very breath of the calm country land refreshes the worn student or the weary

VOL. XXIII.-3

business man; the green fields, stretching far away to the serene horizon with its belt of forest, seem to smile and beckon:-the old country house embowered in its elms, or its oaks, seems to hold out arms of welcome, and to murmur "come!"

It is no matter that the fences may be old-the oaks dead at the top, and sonorous with the drumming woodpeckerthe porch, ancient, weather-beaten, discolored with the sun and storm of many generations, during which timbers have warped, and the pillars cracked. There is even a charm in this rural simplicitythis homely absence of pretension; it is better to look upon than marble custom houses, and the swallows darting hither and thither in the rosy atmosphere of evening, alighting ever and anon upon the old stack of chimneys or the drooping eaves, make a merrier music with their twitter than the finest singer of the opera.

It is another life which the weary spirit feels as he enters this serene domain of ancient peace; where the good old door stands hospitably open-where the children run to and fro "at their own wild will" on the flowery lawn :-and where every one, from the master of the plantation down to the old toothless hound who rises and wags his tail, and then lies down again, seems to extend a silent and unostentatious welcome.

I think that one explanation of the pleasure thus derived lies in the fact, that in such scenes as this you see something really Virginian—some trace of the old land-and I am old-fashioned and foolish enough to think that everything truly Virginian is truly delightful. I don't think Virginia perfect: but I certainly do think that, like most strong individualities, her faults are often the excess of virtues:-and especially is this true of the honest old Virginia which alas! lingers for us to-day only in a few houses far away from the noisy worldequally inaccessible to the majestic English travellers who condescend to write about us, and our kind Northern friends,

who sum up the spirit of our institutions, and so obligingly inform us what we are, and ought to be. The truth is, that Virginia proper is hard to get at-it retires from view-it does not "assert itself”— and is thus in danger of being lost sight of in the hurry and bustle of the life of the great world. But there is still something of it left:-and once within the good old fashioned land, the charmed circle, a new influence seems to fall upon the heartwe live again in the past.

These "moral reflections" have been suggested to me by the perusal of an old volume bearing on its back, in uncouth letters, the title “Virginia Gazette, 1768;" and I have taken the same pleasure in reading its contents, which I am accustomed to experience, in going away from the heated city to the country. Tossed like a leaf of autumn on the immense flood of gilded no-literature in "cloth" and bad wood-cuts-borne hither and thither on the noisy current of cotemporary duodecimos, surging over the land like a new deluge-I have gladly taken refuge in the quiet eddy, so to speak, of the old brownbacked gazette, with its heavy type, its unpretending columns of news or essay, and its poetical "effusions" wandering between the wide margins, like a brook through the meadows;-and, thus, forgetting for a time the immense genius and enormous productions of the present age, have taken a breathing spell, and recovered I think something of my equanimity.

There is no gilt at all upon the old Gazette-it was originally dressed rather plainly, and not having purchased new clothes since, has indeed become rather shabby and out at the elbows. I fancy however that it resembles a poor gentleman in this particular-indeed has a distant similitude to old Virginia herself where poor gentlemen have always been immensely popular:-and just as it is more pleasant to converse with a true gentleman however poor his costume, than with the parvenue who flaunts in the most splendid personal adornment:—so is it more agreeable to peruse the ancient Gazette, than to read the gilt duodecimos of to-day. The simple explanation of my

interest on the present occasion, is found in the fact that this honest old brownbacked folio presents in vivid colors, a picture of what Virginia was at the remote period of its publication.

As I read, the present seemed to pass away from me:-the rush and roar of contemporary life, with its bubbles and glitter, its gilding and pretension, disappeared and was silenced;-with a calm brow and smiling lips I entered the bright domain of old Virginia, beneath laughing skies, along stately rivers :-and as I turned over leaf after leaf, all that Past which we have heard vaguely of, and seen dimly through the mists of many generations, became again the Present for me, and refreshed me. As you read the old pages all the brilliant forms of long gone years rise up and pass onward smiling and beautiful:-the gay laugh and the jest ring careless and free:-the grand brows of those Virginia giants who achieved our liberties are plainer than they are in any portraits.

The House of Burgesses is dissolved by the Governor, and meets in the Apollo room of the Raleigh tavern, to make history: the planters roll in their chariots and four to the race course, or the cockfight, or the County Court:-the parson thwacks the cushion of his tub-shaped pulpit: the commercial traveller "intends for Europe"-the young men and maidens are laughing and sighing; and making love to each other in a thousand old country houses, under the moon, or the stars! All this do we read in the good old Gazette:-and especially the latter. It is almost the only authority as to the manner in which the grandfathers and grandmothers of the present generation courted and were courted in those long past days, in the old land.

Let me endeavor to take from the pregnant pages a few of these old gallant verses; and however moderate may be their poetical merit, perhaps some of the present generation may be pleased to know how their lovely little great-grandmothers were addressed by their gay young great-grandfathers. Those honest personages hang upon many walls— why should they not illustrate our idle

sketch, since no Virginia writer will rise up to make them "point a moral or adorn a tale" for us? They are crumbled long, and only their names remain:-were it not for the Virginia Gazette, it is doubtful whether even this much would exist. Soon it too will disappear. The few copies of the paper are lying in garrets and dust-covered chests:-or they are used for waste paper by those who do not appreciate a volume unless it is gilded, and duodecimo, and of yesterday:-or they are exposed to quick destruction, as happened the other year in the National Capitol, where a complete sett was burned along with many thousands of other inestimable volumes-our worthy legislators being much too busy with presidentmaking to think of book-preserving.

It is doubtful whether many of the present generation have even heard of the "Virginia Gazette"-and its old brown backs, and yellow leaves would certainly not attract them. Why should they? The events even of the old days are unknown to them-much more the picturesque life. How many of the rising generation can tell you why the statue of Andrew Lewis is being moulded in a foreign land-to be erected in the Capital of Virginia beside Jefferson and Henry, and the great hearts of the past? When was the battle of Point Pleasant fought-and what was it all about? Who was Lord Dunmore-and what was the character of that worthy? Was John Quincy Adams speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1650 or 1660-and why did Bacon side with Botetourt and Culpepper in their opposition to the Stamp Act just before the battle of Craney Island? I doubt if any of the rising generation could reply to these simple historical interrogatories:-they do not know why that nobleman of the great mountains will soon stand in the capital of the land which he and his gallant comrades bled for: they do not know the very outlines, the land-marks of our history:how much less the picturesque and delightful details.

Oh! for the day when Virginia shall be discovered!

and he still delays or finds no royal personage to fit out his pinnaces and launch them on the wide waste of waters! Perhaps even now he is travelling foot weary on the highway-or offering his manuscript calculations to some Genoese in Nassau street:-or painfully breaking eggs before envious courtiers, who grant that the varlet is ingenious, but laugh aloud at his wild hallucinations, and his dreams.

You see whither the Gazette is leading me, and how I wander. But it seems to me that this is the compass for our Virginia Columbus-yet to arise. As the Tyrolese looks for the avatar of Tell and Hofer:-as the Aztec for his lord:-the Saxon for his great King Arthur;-and Carlyle for the "earnest" coming-man:— so does the present writer look for the Virginia Colon of that ancient period!

But my object in writing was not to "perorate" about the neglect of those rich stores lying perdue in Virginia history. If they are not as well known and appreciated by the community at large as they should be, they are yet more or less familiar to the few admirable investigators of our annals, among whom it is unnecessary for me to class Mr. Campbell and Mr. Grigsby, whose contributions are of inestimable value, and will "ripen as the years increase" -as will those of others who have dedicated themselves with the true spirit of the historian, to the elucidation of our great Virginia story. My purpose was to present a few poetical extracts from the old volume referred to "effusions" they were called at this simple period-bearing upon the interesting topics of love, courtship, and marriage.

In our own day these affairs are carried on with more or less privacy—at least the two former proceedings; and if the siege which Corydon lays to the heart of Chloe, gets to be public, Mrs. Grundy is the only tale-teller. That venerable old lady who knows everything, and a great deal more, very frequently listens, we are sorry to say, at keyholes and behind curtains:-and thus the affairs of Corydon and Chloe are made in reality as

The world waits for Columbus vainly, public, as the secret consultations of the

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