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unless he counts the spots upon its wing. The mountain rises in the distance, and he hastens to examine the strata of which it is composed. The vapours roll beneath him, and he ponders upon the means of their production. The stars are shining above in all the majesty of cloudless night, and he counts the number, and calculates the distance of the worlds of light.

All these we freely grant are right and fitting occupations for a rational and intellectual being; but when pursuits of this kind, instead of the end to which they lead, are made the sole business of man's life, the natural consequence must be, to render him familiar indeed with nature, but familiar on such terms that he is in danger of forfeiting his reverence for the Creator, and losing sight of the connection between the material and the moral world.

We are not so blindly wedded to the vagaries of imagination as to speak of this thirst for definite knowledge, as an evil. Far from it. But when the unenlightened, or the imbecile mind becomes infected with this fever of acquisition; when the juvenile philosopher is merely talking about what he ought to feel; when the puny artist no sooner beholds a tree, than he thinks it necessary to sketch it; when the student

of nature tears in pieces every bird and insect that falls within his grasp; when books without number are eagerly inquired for, looked into, laid aside, and never understood; when the finished and fully-educated young lady displays her knowledge of the phraseology of foreign languages, and her ignorance of the spirit of her own; when the youthful metaphysician discourses eloquently upon the nature and laws of mind and matter, and hears with total vacuity of understanding that there is a moral law; we cannot help feeling that something is wanting of the ultimate end of education, and that the mind may be stored with knowledge, and yet be too ignorant of the right means of applying that knowledge to render its possessor wise.

The man of comprehensive mind, capable of appreciating all things according to their real value, will cultivate this knowledge of material things for the sake of the truths which it establishes, and the consequences to which it leads; and will no more content himself with this examination of external nature, than the sculptor will rest satisfied with having discovered the block of marble, out of which his figure is to be formed.

If the question might be asked without implying an ignorant and stupid want of reverence for knowledge in general, we should propose for the consideration of those who regret the absence of poetry from the world of letters, whether the defect so obvious in the literature of the present day, may not arise, in the first place from the competition, and the consequent labour that is now actually necessary to secure the means of subsistence; and in the second, from the public mind being too fully occupied with the acquisition of mere knowledge, to allow time for receiving deep impressions, without which it is impossible either to write, or to feel poetically. If, for instance, in the cases already specified, the attention be wholly occupied in ascertaining the precise form of a leaf, where will be the impression of the majestic beauty of the forest? if in dissecting the organs of sense, what general idea can be formed of the melody of sound? if in examining the wing of the butterfly, what observation can be made upon its airy and fantastic flight? if in discovering the component. parts of a cloud, how should the graceful involutions of the cloud be seen? if in chiselling out minute fragments from the side of the

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mountain, how should a deep sense of its grandeur pervade the soul? or if in merely counting the stars as separate spots of light, where will be the lasting impress of their glory?

The modern observer having had little time, and less inclination for the relative ideas which the contemplation of such objects affords to the poetic mind, they pass away from his thoughts as soon as his practical purpose has been fulfilled, and never afterwards are recalled as links in the chain of association connecting the material with the ideal world. When the wild winds of autumn sweep the many tinted leaves from the forest; like the ruder blasts of a less physical calamity, despoiling the fair pictures of spiritual beauty; the summer garniture of green and golden foliage lives no longer in remembrance. The woodland songster breathes no more; and the living voice that answered the universal language of nature from the fields, the groves, and the si very waterfalls, is forgotten. The butterfly that lately fluttered round him like a winged flower escaped from Flora's coronet, a spotted specimen of a particular tribe-classed according to its name, lies before him faded, and lifeless, and dismantled of its beauty-the memory of its

aerial rambles extinguished with its transient and joyous life. The cloud has passed, and all its graceful and fantastic wreathes of mingled mist and light, floating upon the pure ocean of celestial blue, like a spirit half earthly half divine, wandering on his upward journey to the realms of bliss, have vanished with the sunbeams that gave a short-lived glory to its ephemeral existence. The lofty and majestic mountain no longer rises on the view; and his towering summit pointing to the sky, the deep ravines that cross and intersect his rugged sides like the foot prints of the retiring deluge -the light upon his golden brow, and the dark shadows that lie beneath like the frown of a mighty monarch whose will is life or death -all these have passed away from thought and memory, and a tiny particle of stone-a grain of granite remains in the hand of the modern philosopher, as his sole memorial of a mountain. Or when he grasps the telescope, and strains his eye to count the stars; before his labours cease, a dim line of light begins to mark out the eastern horizon, and one after another the stars retire before the brighter radiance of ascending day, like guardian angels who have watched the wanderer through his

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