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ALISON ON EDUCATION.

203

of nature are likely to insure. Nature and the human mind are made to each other; wisely and wonderfully are they adapted; and that man is likely to be the happiest and best (other things being equal) who has the most of nature's beauties for his birthright and daily observation, from infancy to old age.

It is of great consequence, says Alison, in the education of the young, to encourage their instinctive taste for the beauty and sublimity of nature. "While it opens to the years of infancy and youth a source of pure and permanent enjoyment, it has consequences on the character and happiness of future life, which they are unable to foresee. It is to provide them, amid all the agitations and trials of society, with one gentle and unreproaching friend, whose voice is ever in alliance with goodness and virtue, and which, when once understood, is able both to smooth misfortune and reclaim from folly. It is to identify them with the happiness of that nature to which they belong; to give them an interest in every species of being which surrounds them; and, amid the hours of curiosity and delight, to awaken those latent feelings of benevolence and of sympathy, from which all the moral or intellectual greatness of man finally arises.

"It is to lay the foundation of an early and of a manly piety; amid the magnificent system of material signs in which they reside, to give them the mighty key which can interpret them; and to make them look upon the universe which they inhabit, not as the abode only of human cares or human joys, but as the temple of the living God, in which praise is due, and where service is to be performed."

There is a truth of universal experience in the first stanza of Byron's magnificent Apostrophe to the Ocean, which no teachers of youth, nor any who are striving to build for themselves characters of greatness, should ever suffer to go out of mind.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society which none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.

I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be or have been before,

To mingle with the universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal.

Bryant, in his Thanatopsis, expresses it better:

To him who, in the love of Nature, holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile,
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings with a mild
And gentle sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness ere he is aware.

And Wordsworth, better than either :

Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

NATURE'S DISCIPLINE

FOR THE SOUL. 205

And again, in the Poem of The Excursion:

Wisdom and spirit of the universe!

Thou soul, that art the eternity of thought!
And giv'st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,

By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature; purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognize

A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

This has been too long a chapter of glimpses and echoes, some readers may say of moralizings, in which I may seem to have wandered from the beaten track of prose, and will not therefore go back, except to bid good-by to the Kailua Thurston household, and to wish them all success and joy in their honorable work. That, we are persuaded, will not be wanting, although the situation Providence has allotted them does not combine all the advantages of genial natural scenery that could be desired.

May the children left to this honored pair be as full of promise and hope as she was whom God took so early to himself. And may the parents live to see every bud of promise blossom and ripen with generous fruit!

CHAPTER X.

FRUITS OF FOREIGN INTERCOURSE, WORK OF THE MISSIONARY, AND DISABILITIES OF THE PEOPLE.

Like the shadows in the stream,
Like the evanescent gleam

Of the twilight's failing blaze;
Like the fleeting years and days,
Like all things that soon decay,
Pass the Indian tribes away.
Ah! the Indian's heart is ailing,
And the Indian's blood is failing:
Red men and their realms must sever;
They forsake them, and forever!

I. M'CLELLAN.

THE celebrity which Kealakekua Bay acquired by Cook's visit and death, and its being laid down, for a long time, more accurately on the charts than any other place, has caused it to be more or less visited, from time to time, by whale ships and men-of-war. I arrived here a few days ago from Kailua, and find the anchorage good, so that vessels of the largest burden may ride safely at all times of the year, and recruit with wood, hogs, sweet potatoes, and bananas. Supplies, however, of every thing but wood are often scarce and dear, and good water is not to be had at all.

Foreigners have left the marks of their lust deep and destructive in the constitution of the people, from Cap

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