LESSON LXXXVIII

An Address to a young Student.—Knox.

YOUR parents have watched over your helpless infancy, and conducted you, with many a pang, to an age at which your mind is capable of manly improvement. Their solicitude still continues, and no trouble nor expense is spared, in giving you all the instructions and accomplishments which may enable you to act your part in life, as a man of polished sense and confirmed virtue.

You have, then, already contracted a great debt of gratitude to them. You can pay it by no other method, but by using properly the advantages which their goodness has afforded you. If your own endeavors are deficient, it is in vain that you have tutors, books, and all the external apparatus of literary pursuits. You must love learning, if you would possess it. In order to love it, you must feel its delights; in order to feel its delights, you must apply to it, however irksome at first, closely, constantly, and for a considerable time.

If you have resolution enough to do this, you cannot but love learning; for the mind always loves that to which it has been so long, steadily, and voluntarily attached. Habits are formed, which render what was at first disagreeable, not only pleasant, but necessary. Pleasant indeed, are all the paths which lead to polite and elegant literature. Yours then is surely a lot particularly happy. Your education is of such a sort, that its principal scope is, to prepare you to receive a refined pleasure during your life.

Elegance, or delicacy of taste, is one of the first objects of classical discipline; and it is this fine quality which opens a new world to the scholar's view. Elegance of taste has a connexion with many virtues, and all of them virtues of the most amiable kind. It tends to render you at once good and agreeable; you must therefore be an enemy to your own enjoyment, if you enter on the discipline which leads to the attainment of a classical and liberal education, with reluctance. Value duly the opportunities you enjoy, and which are denied to thousands of your fellow creatures.

By laying in a store of useful knowledge, adorning your mind with elegant literature, improving and establishing

your conduct by virtuous principles, you cannot fail of being a comfort to those friends who have supported you, of being happy within yourself, and of being well received by mankind. Honor and success in life will probably attend you. Under all circumstances you will have an eternal source of consolation and entertainment, of which no sublunary vicissitude can deprive you.

Time will show how much wiser has been your choice than that of your idle companions, who would gladly have drawn you into their association, or rather into their conspiracy, as it has been called, against good manners, and against all that is honorable and useful. While you appear in society as a respectable and valuable member of it, they will, perhaps, have sacrificed at the shrine of vanity, pride, and extravagance, and false pleasure, their health and their sense, their fortune and their characters.

LESSON LXXXIX.

The Rivulet.-BRYANT.

THIS little rill that, from the springs
Of yonder grove, its current brings,
Plays on the slope awhile, and then
Goes prattling into groves again,
Oft to its warbling waters drew
My little feet when life was new.
When woods in early green were drest,
And from the chambers of the west
The warmer breezes, travelling out,
Breathed the new scent of flowers about,
My truant steps from home would stray,
Upon its grassy side to play;

To crop the violet on its brim,
And listen to the throstle's hymn,
With blooming cheek and open brow,
As young and gay, sweet rill, as thou.

And when the days of boyhood came,
And I had grown in love with fame,
Duly I sought thy banks, and tried
My first rude numbers by thy side.

Words cannot tell how glad and gay
The scenes of life before me lay.
High visions then, and lofty schemes
Glorious and bright as fairy dreams,
And daring hopes, that now to speak,
Would bring the blood into my cheek,
Passed o'er me; and I wrote on high
A name I deemed should never die.

Years change thee not. Upon yon hill The tall old maples, verdant still, Yet tell, in proud and grand decay, How swift the years have passed away, Since first, a child, and half afraid, I wandered in the forest shade. But thou, gay, merry rivulet, Dost dimple, play, and prattle yet; And sporting with the sands that pave The windings of thy silver wave, And dancing to thy own wild chime, Thou laughest at the lapse of time.

The same sweet sounds are in my ear, My early childhood loved to hear; As pure thy limpid waters run, As bright they sparkle to the sun; As fresh the herbs that crowd to drink The moisture of thy oozy brink; The violet there, in soft May dew, Comes up, as modest and as blue; As green amid thy current's stress, Floats the scarce-rooted water cress; And the brown ground bird, in thy glen, Still chirps as merrily as then.

Thou changest not-but I am changed, Since first thy pleasant banks I ranged; And the grave stranger, come to see The play-place of his infancy, Has scarce a single trace of him, Who sported once upon thy brim. The visions of my youth are pastToo bright, too beautiful to last,

I've tried the world-it wears no more
The coloring of romance it wore.
Yet well has nature kept the truth
She promised to my earliest youth;
The radiant beauty, shed abroad
On all the glorious works of God,
Shows freshly, to my sobered eye,
Each charm it wore in days gone by.

A few brief years shall pass away,
And I, all trembling, weak, and gray,
Bowed to the earth, which waits to fold
My ashes in the embracing mould,
(If haply the dark will of fate
Indulge my life so long a date)
May come for the last time to look
Upon my childhood's favorite brook,
Then dimly on my eyes shall gleam
The sparkle of thy dancing stream;
And faintly on my ear shall fall
Thy prattling current's merry call;
Yet shalt thou flow as glad and bright
As when thou met'st my infant sight.

And I shall sleep-and on thy side,
As ages after ages glide,

Children their early sports shall try,
And pass to hoary age and die.

But thou, unchanged from year to year,
Gaily shalt play and glitter here;
Amid young flowers and tender grass
Thy endless infancy shalt pass;
And, singing down thy narrow glen,
Shalt mock the fading race of men.

LESSON XC.

To the Evening Wind.-BRYANT.

SPIRIT that breathest through my lattice, thou That cool'st the twilight of the sultry day, Gratefully flows thy freshness round my brow;

Thou hast been out upon the deep at play, Riding all day the wild blue waves till now,

Roughening their crests, and scattering high their spray.
And swelling the white sail. I welcome thee
To the scorched land, thou wanderer of the sea!

Nor I alone-a thousand bosoms round
Inhale thee in the fulness of delight;
And languid forms rise up, and pulses bound
Livelier, at coming of the wind of night;
And, languishing to hear thy grateful sound,
Lies the vast inland stretched beyond the sight.
Go forth, into the gathering shade; go forth,
God's blessing breathed upon the fainting earth!

Go, rock the little wood-bird in his nest,

Curl the still waters, bright with stars, and rouse
The wide old wood from his majestic rest,
Summoning from the innumerable boughs
The strange, deep harmonies that haunt his breast;
Pleasant shall be thy way where meekly bows
The shutting flower, and darkling waters pass,
And 'twixt the o'ershadowing branches and the grass.

The faint old man shall lean his silver head

To feel thee; thou shalt kiss the child asleep,
And dry the moistened curls that overspread
His temples, while his breathing grows more deep;
And they who stand about the sick man's bed,
Shall joy to listen to thy distant sweep,

And softly part his curtains to allow
Thy visit, grateful to his burning brow.

Go-but the circle of eternal change,

Which is the life of nature, shall restore,
With sounds and scents from all thy mighty range
Thee to thy birthplace of the deep once more;
Sweet odors in the sea-air, sweet and strange,
Shall tell the home-sick mariner of the shore;
And, listening to thy murmur, he shall deem
He hears the rustling leaf and running stream,