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professed lover of truth, and the skeptic; it would seem that the world is equally averse here, as it is elsewhere,

To all the truth it sees or hears,
But swallows nonsense and a lie,
With greediness and gluttony.'

That ridicule, in this country, is more powerful than reason, may be gathered from this fact, that the brilliant conceptions of native genius have all but vanished from every boudoir and drawing-room, to make way for the imperishable productions of Pickwick,' or some elaborate lucubration on Animal Magnetism; while the puerile common places of the Journal,' and the soporiferous mixtures of Miss Martineau, have caused men entirely to forget that Stuart's judicious and dispassionate strictures on America ever had a local habitation and a name, among the things that be. He whose turn of mind inclines him to behold things in a ludicrous point of view, is alone sure to succeed in commanding attention; but if he have the art of making his readers suppose that it is not their own character, but that of their neighbors, to whom his sarcasm refers, oh! then he may prepare his notes and additions; for nothing can stem the impetuous career of his popularity. No wonder, therefore, that so many writers, should seize on all they can, with the blind, reckless grasp of the drowning, in utter violation of the sanctities of truth and decorum.

I have a series of sketches and episodes in store, which, if not so fertile in incident and character as those which our own metropolis affords, will at least, from their novelty, serve to beguile your leisure hours. My next may perhaps contain a slight sprinkling of such; meanwhile, as you must be aware that my orbit is decidedly eccentric, you will not expect any thing like method, or consistency of narrative, in my descriptions; and should that interesting personage, called self, be found rising too often on the surface, or seeking to crowd the vacancy of expectation with too great a multitude of its own frigid conceits, you are also supplicated to remember, that my mind, having been almost entirely shaken from its equilibrium by this novel transition of scenes, will not be brought to attend assiduously to any thing but its own thoughts, or rather feelings, which constantly rise to the surface, whatever be the pursuit which actually occupies me; scattered and refracted in a thousand ways, but still retaining the same image, as the agitated waters insensibly produce the same reflection, however broken and disjointed.

ОМБЕА.

TIME'S TELESCOPE.

TIME'S telescope more wonderful appears
E'en than his scythe, and deeper truths conveys;
His tube prospective lengthens days to years-
Reversed, our years it shortens into days!
Then pouder well the substance, and the sum
Of what, unscanned, a contradiction seems;
Valued aright, compared with time to come,
Time past is but the wealth of him that dreams.

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And must the blood of innocence be spilt,

For deeds of dark transgressors to atone?
And must the hope of pardoning love be built
Upon the sufferings of the pure alone?
O! Holy God! thus, for a world's deep guilt,
Was shed the blood of thine eternal Son!
Thus, from the stain of sin to set us free,
Its precious flood was pour'd on Calvary!
Wilmington, (Del.,) December, 1837.

HACK VON STRETCHER.

A CRY AND PRAYER

AGAINST THE IMPRISONMENT OF SMALL CHILDREN.

THE Persian Cyrus, it seems, learned nothing, when a child, but to ride, shoot, and speak the truth; which, Sir Walter Scott told Mr. Irving, was all he had taught his sons.

A better education, be sure, than most boys get, in this time of books, and country of schools!

Because a boy's great business is TO GROW- to develope, form, and harden his expanding frame into something like its natural perfection; and thus lay the foundation of health, strength, and long life. This Nature very plainly intimates, by the energy wherewith she is continually impelling him to active out-door exercises. These mature, in the best manner possible, his whole organization; engaging his mind in sympathetic activity with his body; in observation, recollection, comparison, description of things with practical experiments, devices, and constructions.

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While his body and mind are thus acquiring hardihood and activity, and filling out their natural proportions, teach him to speak the truth; and what is he not, by the time he becomes a big boy, that the son of a king, or of any honest man, ought to be?

His whole organization is so fairly set forward, in a healthful development, that nothing, short of the act of God, can now arrest it. He can endure reasonable confinement and application, without injury or discomfort. He is eager for knowledge; for he has never been drugged or surfeited with it of kinds that he could not relish, or in quantities that he could not digest. What he has learned, he has learned naturally, and has enjoyed, both in acquisition and in possession. Learning, in his experience, is pure pleasure and gain. And with the increased self-command, and power of reflection, that years have given him, he is now ready to proceed to more systematic study, with a natural appetite and capacity; and with physical stamina, adequate to sustain mental action.

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How different a creature, at the same age, is he, too often, who was sent, before he could go alone, to an Infant School; and has been kept, cabined, cribbed, confined-bound in by saucy doubts and fears' six, seven, or eight hours a day, on a school-house bench, and in a school-house atmosphere, year after year, up to the age of twelve or fourteen! What does the boy know? Very little, certainly, of the world about him. Very little of actual nature, in her various shapes, aspects, and phenomena. He has very little of that experimental knowledge and practical skill, which the curiosity and quick sensations of boyhood so peculiarly fit it to acquire, in social sports, bold exercises, and habitual intimacy with the elements and seasons earth and air and their growths and creatures. But he can read, write, and cipher. He knows the English for some Latin and French words, it may be; and can repeat, memoriter, certain scientific facts and rules; which (and especially their application) he cannot, in the nature of things, fairly understand. For this, he has been made a pining prisoner half the waking hours of his life; and is now left, at the most critical epoch of his constitu

tion, more or less pale, crooked, feeble, under-sized, nervous, and timid. Commonly, he can neither walk, dance, run, ride, swim, fight, or speak-well. He has acquired little or none of that vigor, dexterity, and grace, in the use of his limbs and organs, which exercise, While the frame is flexible, alone can give; and this, very probably, occasions a disuse of bodily exercise, for life: because no man takes pleasure in doing habitually what he does ill, after the season for learning to do it well is gone by.

Now is it possible, that while this poor boy's body has been thus afflicted and reduced, his mind has been a real gainer? Must it not be the ultimate sufferer? Probably one of two things has happened. Either confinement, and attempted application to studies in which he cannot engage himself— for nature never meant he should have so disgusted his feelings, and cowed his spirits, that he learns nothing; and, what with vacuity and dreary inaction, his mind gradually stultifies over his books, and contracts an immortal aversion, and almost incapacity, for study; or he becomes what is called, in school, a 'good scholar;' that is: his nature yields to the violence that is done her; gradually withdraws her vital forces from their proper work of feeding and corroborating his whole growth, and concentrates them on the brain; maintaining it in that morbid activity, to which it has been wrought up by constant stimulation of his ambition.

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Thus, what the poor fellow is praised and congratulated for effecting, in such a case, amounts usually to this - that he has resisted the strongest impulses of his boyish nature impulses, the obedience to which, and the acting them out, alone could mature that nature into manhood he has defeated them: he has reduced his little frame to quiet subjection, and a slow growth - paled his cheek, slackened his pulse, tamed his heart- fixed that clear eye, and bent the arch of that open brow, and excited the mysterious organ behind it to a morbid and premature activity, that consumes those vital energies, which are needed for the development of his whole system. How certain, that this precocious mental action, after exhausting the very means of establishing permanent organic power, must be succeeded by a momentous reaction, which leaves a majority of these childish prodigies with an over-wrought, languid mind, to accompany a feeble body, through the studies of youth, and the labors of manhood.

Why then, my dear madam allow me to inquire why need your son, for the first six or seven years of his life, ever open a book? A startling query, truly! in this incomparable nineteenth century of ours, which has repeatedly resolved itself to be greater and better than all the eighteen (not to say fifty or sixty) that have gone before it, could they be lumped in one-this age, that has brought cant and humbug, as well as some better things, to an unprecedented perfection, (and, a word in your ear, madam- education-twattle is its pet cant, and baby-schools and baby-books its pet humbug,)-in such an age, a saucy query mine, truly! But, I pray you, answer, or at least consider it, fair lady. 'Tis put, believe me, quite in earnest, and with cordial good intent. Why need your little darling open a book? He can learn nothing that he cannot learn in a hundredth part of the time hereafter, and without being urged or annoyed. And as for the mental exercise, he does not need it; he inevitably suffers

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from it. His mind, like his body, instinctively takes all the exercise that is good for it. It is matter of notoriety, that children who are obliged by poverty to do a great deal of hard work daily-as in the English factories very generally come to be dwarfish and short-lived men. Now, a child's mind is no more capable than his body, of severe or continuous application; and if subjected to it, he is abused. 'When I was a child,' saith a wise and sainted scholar (whom I know you reverence, madam, notwithstanding that petulant little obiter dictum that fell from you, awhile ago, anent his metaphysics) 'when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Do not attempt to improve on this good pattern, by requiring your child to put away childish things before nature has made him capable of any other; and to learn our hard lessons, instead of her easy and well-remembered ones,

That little limber, laughing elf,
Dancing, singing, to itself;

With fairy eyes, and red, round cheeks,
That ever finds and never seeks;

for heaven's sake metamorphose it not into

'the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school!'

O leave him to play, and grow, and be happy; and in the lustre of his joyous innocence, remind men of the kingdom of heaven! Let him play out childhood's sweet little prelude to the busy drama of life entirely ad libitum― his exits and his entrances at his own good pleasure. Let him spend the live-long day, if he pleases, sub Dio; let him bring home every night a face embrowned by Phoebus, or reddened by Aquilo; let him play with Amphytrite, in her element, and chase the Nymphs on their mountains; let him rival the Fawns in archness, and the Satyrs in merriment — and I care not if this be, at present, his only acquaintance with classic Mythology. The more potent he is among his play-fellows the more inveterate his vagrancy the more unextinguishable his laughter- the stronger his preference for the outside of a house over the inside -the more invincible his aversion to long sessions and unintelligible lectures — the more hopeful you may think him. And boon Nature, be sure, whose impulses he is obeying whose laws he is living by - whose child he is will impel his little mind to all the action that will benefit it to all, that consists with its tender immaturity, and rapid growth; teaching him, by other inspiration than the birch's terrors, or the medal's lure, to

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'find tongues in trees,

Books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,
And good in every thing :'

Just the sermons, the books, and the tongues for his edification. From them, better than from all the first-lessons, or infant-school-philosophical-apparatus, ever devised, he will learn that habit of observa

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