studies. It gratifies the curiosity: it furnishes endless food for thought; and it multiplies our own experience, for breadth and value, by as many fold, as the area of our observation is extended outwardly from ourselves. All human character and conduct, fate and fortune, are covered up within its ample folds. The older the thinker or writer, the larger his stores of thought and the wider the scope of his powers-the higher always is the estimate that he sets upon the value of historical knowledge.

History must be studied philosophically, and its lessons conned over and over again, or its rich harvests of truths will be only looked at, but not reaped by the student. The true history of a nation is its inner not its outer history-the history of its courses of thought, purpose, and achievement. Its external show of bustle, pomp, and pride may please children, who like noise and glitter, but not a real man, who looks beneath the surface after the hidden springs of all that at any time appears upon it. The track of historical investigation, that every truly educated man should traverse with care, beside that passing through the dimmer regions of antiquity, in Egypt, Phoenicia, Judea, and western Asia: beginning with Greece, where the historic muse first combined exactness and fullness of record with high elevation of style, passing through Rome and the Middle Ages, and modern Europe, as such, branches off into separate lines of special interest, through Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Spain, England, and America, with all of which countries the developments of modern progress are greatly connected. It is singular, indeed, that our scholars are so generally contented to be ignorant of the history of Germany and of Holland, to which two countries we are more indebted than to all others of the present day, except England. To Germany we owe, to a high degree, our blood and language and reformed faith and scholarship; and, like England, Germany deserves from modern society, at large, for its intellectual explorations and discoveries, for its many practical inventions, and for its general spirit of progress, the highest possible appreciation and gratitude.

(3.) The knowledge of human language and literature.

Language is, for all its uses, the chief of earthly studies. It is in itself alone, as a piece of mechanism, of the deepest interest; and, with such endless connections, does each language run into and out of others, before, around, and behind it, that no one can be studied with any adequacy by itself alone. Language is our first intellectual want; and there is nothing next after our limbs, that, to the end of life, we use so much. There is no such other mode, in which we are always doing good or harm. "Life and death are in the power of the tongue;" and, therefore, "by our words we shall be justified, and by our words we shall be condemned."

There is no intellectual discipline at all equal to the study of language, for variety and force of stimulation to every faculty. No one is really educated, who has not made it a study; and no attention to it can be called a study, which is not analytic and philosophical, and which does not centre in the classical languages, as its great fountain of interest. Variety and fullness of linguistic culture are specially demanded, in the American system of education, beyond anything yet generally conceived. All those languages should be embraced in our system of education, with which, as such, our own language is most fully connected, and whose history and literature have attained to any large growth and maturity. Philology has recently, by a wondrous series of explorations, brought to light a wide array of most curious and valuable facts concerning the different languages of the world, whether viewed singly or in combination. There is no more inviting field of research, now open before an earnest, deep-searching mind. Here is a land abounding in mines of gold and precious stones. Labor is sure of its reward, and glittering prizes on every side await discovery. Literature and its history also furnish a large and fruitful field of study. Here language is employed, not, as in the daily intercourse of life, for present uses, but as the guardian of the precious treasures of thought and experience, laid by in the past for the benefit of all succeeding ages. Here are to be found, alike, the selectest monuments of human genius, and the most enduring memorials of human toil.

The historic literature of the world hangs together, in a con

nected chain of sequences, from first to last. Modern literature is but the broader and fuller efflorescence of the higher growths of thought, that have appeared on the summits of each preceding age. This age is what it is, and English literature has become what it is, because Greece and Rome, and Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and Holland, from whom, in various degrees, it has derived its substance, form, and features, were each respectively what they were. There is no one body of literature, of such majestic proportions, and of so many beautiful and divine aspects, as our own; and this, according not only to our own view, which might be unconsciously perverted, but that also of the great men of other nations, as loudly proclaimed in many directions. Our own literature, I have said; for we are richer in literature than even England herself, as we own all hers and ours also. It is a great defect, in our common style of personal self-improvement, as well as of our system of public instruction, that so little account is had, or rather in most cases no account at all is had, of the vast continent of literature to be found in our language: excelling in breadth and variety, and the luxuriance of its growths, all the literature of the world, present and past beside. Surely here again, "the prophet is without honor in his own country." In connection with our own literature, the man of anything like full education will acquaint himself with Grecian and Roman literature also, without a thorough knowledge of which, indeed, he cannot understand or appreciate our own; as well as with German and French belles lettres, especially German, so full of all vital energies of thought and feeling. Esthetical culture brings great rewards to its possessor, both in respect to his high personal enjoyment and in respect to his influence, as a thinker and writer, over others. No eye can gaze unmoved upon structures of beauty in the world of thought, or see them rise, as if by magic, like fairy castles, under hands skillful in rearing them, without admiration.

To this department of study, criticism and rhetoric belong, the two chief forms of literary art; which are of the highest value, when supplemental to previous courses of thorough mental discipline, but are never to be, as they sometimes have

been, substituted for them. As well might one think of filling the parts of a huge edifice, which should be occupied by solid masonry, with the light ornamental work that belongs only to its finishings.

(4.) The knowledge of human wants.

The true object of education is, to acquire the power and the disposition to do good, to the highest possible degree. As the will is made sovereign in the constitution of the mind itself, so the moral is the crowning glory of all the powers and faculties of our entire manhood. It is the law prevailing throughout the whole universe of minds, that he who has obtained treasures of any kind must share them with others, or be made miserable by withholding them. It is as logically and practically necessary for a man to know the actual state of the world, in which and for which he is fitting himself to act, and whose demands upon his thoughts and labors he is to meet rightly, or his life will be a failure, as for one, who is constructing a steam engine or a telescope, to understand well the principles to be followed, and the ends to be gained by his mechanism, when completed. Many make in education the same mistake that others do in religion: in treating it, as if having a distinct existence by itself, separate from its relations. But all things are for their uses; and all the wonders and beauties of their being are found in their many and marvelous adaptations to those uses; and, so, among the whole army of intelligent beings, "he that would be the greatest of all, must be the servant of all." "To do good as we have opportunity:" this is the law that is not only appointed of God, but reigns, selfordained, also, over every being that possesses reason and conscience. So many have lack-lustre eyes in their studies, because they have no great controlling object of thought and interest in view. The mind is made to lay out its force upon the objective world, as, upon it, also, that outer world is made to pour perpetually all its myriad influences. Each is made for the other; and, as in the partnership of kindred hearts in life, it is not good for either to be alone. The reason why so many fail in the various professions, as indeed well nigh the great majority do, is because they make a wrong selection for them

selves; and this, because their ulterior aims are such as to pervert their judgment and their action.

Another of the general forms of intelligence to be gained in the higher education, is,

2d. Acquaintance with science.

All sciences and all branches of knowledge have been interwoven with each other into a beauteous "garment of praise" to their great author, which, like a royal robe of many colors, he has dropped, as if with purposed carelessness, among his earthly children, that they might, in disentangling its materials, learn to know him in the greatness of his power, and the goodness of his love.

The sciences, so-called, are the exact sciences, (or the mathematics,) the natural sciences, and mental, moral, and legal science. Some knowledge of the mathematics is absolutely necessary to the most ordinary transactions of business. The utilities of mixed mathematics, from simple arithmetic up to any and all of the applications of trigonometry and conic sections, are obvious, as a matter of practical profit to those who employ them. But pure mathematics, from algebra through all parts of the calculus, have in them a higher value still to the mind itself, in the inward wrestling to which they summon it with difficulties, in that invisible, wondrous thought-land, where an intellect of bold, strong tread, most loves to wander. The higher walks, and visions, and exhilarations of mathematical science, must of course be reserved for that little circle of minds, which are so charmed with its abstractions, as to leave everything else neglected by the wayside, in order to seek after then. Great absorption in this one field of investigation, as indeed in any other, can be had only at the sacrifice of inquiry and progress, somewhere else. For the general purposes of education, the mathematics do not compare at all, in power of drill, and variety of mental exercise, and so of consequent mental growth, with the classics.

As to the natural sciences: they are all, more or less, and generally in the most intimate manner, connected with the mathematics, according to whose principles the inward elements of matter are mixed together, and its outward forms are