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the charm could never be preserved by even greater skill and ingenuity than are displayed in the original. Such writers make morality enchanting.

"Truth from their lips prevails with double sway."

It is astonishing how little novelty of thought is to be found. in any age or country in the writings of the most eminent moral. ists and philosophers. New truths are rare, and the human heart remains unchanged. It is the wondrous felicity with which great writers place old truths in a new light, and the grace, clearness or force of their style, that raises our admiration and renders them so useful to mankind. We are told of the difficulty of procuring schoolmasters; but this difficulty is trifling, indeed, when compared with that of procuring competent translators*.

When we take all these considerations into a fair account, it is not difficult to come to a conclusion upon the main subject of the present article. We are thoroughly convinced, that by instructing native children in the English language (which in the dawn of their intellects is an easy attainment), we put into their hands the golden key of a vast treasury of precious knowledge that they would never gain access to by any other means. For their present feeble and defective language (which still, however, they are not obliged wholly to neglect) we give them an instrument for the use of their minds that is in a state of comparative perfection; and we expedite their passage in the road to knowledge, at a rate that will cause the rising generation to make greater progress in twenty years, than could be effected through the medium of the vernacular languages in a century.

Perhaps the most convincing argument in favor of native education through the medium of the English tongue, is a reference to the character and accomplishments of some of those young men who have passed through the Hindu College. Their minds are infinitely more elevated and more robust than those of their countrymen in general, and they talk and think and act like well educated Europeans; they read Bacon and Shakespeare and Johnson and Addison with delight, and have a sense of the true and the beautiful, which could never be acquired from oriental literature alone, of which the general character is confessedly feeble and impure.

THEY CALL ME COLD AND PROUD.

THEY call me cold and proud,

Because my lip and brow

Amid the mirthful crowd

No kindred mirth avow;

But, oh! nor look nor language e'er reveal
How much the sad can love, the lonely feel!

I seek affection's smile,
But vainly gaze around,

For fickleness and guile

In fairest forms are found ;

Sad doubts of human truth my dreams control,

And leave an awful solitude of soul.

The peopled earth appears

As drear as deserts wide,

My gloominess and tears

The stern and gay deride ;—

Alas! life's heartless mockeries who can bear,

When grief is dumb, and deep thought brings despair ?

RURAL HAPPINESS.

(FROM VIRGIL'S GEORGICS, BOOK 11.)

AH! happy Swains! If they their bliss but knew,
Whom, far from boisterous war, Earth's bosom true
With easy food supplies. If they behold

No lofty dome its gorgeous gates unfold
And pour at morn from all its chambers wide
Of flattering visitants the mighty tide :
Nor gaze on beauteous columns richly wrought,
Or tissued robes, or busts from Corinth brought;
Nor their white wool with Tyrian poison soil,
Nor taint with Cassia's bark their native oil:
Yet peace is theirs; a life true bliss that yields;
And various wealth; leisure mid ample fields,
Grottoes, and living lakes, and vallies green,
And lowing herds; and 'neath a sylvan screen
Delicious slumbers. There the lawn and cave
With beasts of chace abound. The young ne'er crave

A prouder lot; their patient toil is cheered;

Their gods are worshipped, and their sires revered;
And there, when Justice passed from earth away,

She left the latest traces of her sway.

ON THE INFLUENCE OF POETRY.

SINCE the publication of the first edition of the Literary Leaves, I have been favored with a communication from a celebrated poet, in which he has made some highly interesting remarks suggested by an article on Poetry and Utilitarianism which is reprinted at page 55 of the present volume. They are so confirmatory of my own views, that I cannot resist the temptation to make some public use of them. As the name of the writer is suppressed I feel assured, from what I know of his character, that he will readily excuse the liberty I take in venturing to offer my readers the following extract from his most kind and acceptable letter.

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"The vindication of poetry against utilitarianism particularly deserves commendation, at a time when push-pin,' in every thing connected with literature is superseding poetry,'-and the utile' in its lowest sense is preferred to the dulce' in its highest. I have myself from time to time in public and in private declaimed not a little against this polished barbarism, this last refinement of excessive civilization, by which all language is to be finally converted into the technical expression of ideas purely abstract, and employed for purposes merely practical,—in the acquisition of sordid wealth and creature-comforts, or in the indulgence of speculations that lead from doubt to doubt on things spiritual, and end in nothing if they end in anything,-that is a contradiction, but it suits the subject, where every thing contradicts every thing, and the mind questioning at length its own existence resolves itself into a series of effects, whether they be called thoughts and sensations, from one great laboratory of causes,— the animal brain, and which, whether they be thoughts or sensations only, are disconnected, though as quickly successive, as the sparks that are generated and instantly extinguished, by the collision of flint and steel. I must break off from this rhapsodical invective, by adding that the prevalence of utilitarianism will not only disenchant the world of all that is poetical and picturesque in it, but will neutralize all that is noble and disinterested in human action by removing the sanctions of eternity from the conscience,

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and gradually obliterating the sense of reponsibility to another and higher tribunal than the earth; without which it is hard to conceive how any man of like passions with ourselves, can be virtuous from principle in the hour of temptation when he can sin to advantage and with impunity. The greatest good to the greatest number,' the favorite maxim of this class of philosophers, can never be accomplished by any code of laws or system of morals which deals with man, whether singly or in society, as of the earth earthy,' without the hope of immortality, and the belief of a judgment to come according to which a state of existence far more important to him than the present will be determined. Utilitarianism, as it is preached and practised, whatever its pretensions may be, is adapted only to the things of time and sense, so far as these can be adapted to the desires and necessities of rational beings with brute destinies, gifted with faculties capable of infinite expansion, yet limited to three score years and ten for their development, and then going to the grave with a surplus of intellect unemployed which might serve to carry them through every inhabited orb in the universe, were that the soul's progress after the death of the body, and prepared for all the exercises and enjoyments of heaven itself to eternity, when soul and body shall be reunited, as we are taught by Revelation to expect they will be. No more ;-you will guess at the meaning of the foregoing verbiage, if I have failed to make it intelligible.—

There is unquestionably a depreciatory opinion respecting the nature of poetry very prevalent, not only amongst ignorant or prejudiced persons, but even amongst many well educated men who pretend to some refinement of taste and feeling. It is lamentable, indeed, after so much has been written upon the subject of poetry by some of the ablest critics in the world, that it should be yet so little understood. This perhaps partly arises from the difficulty of making a distinction in common parlance between the words poetry and metre, though a very little thought is sufficient to convince a man of any discrimination that these are by no means synonymous or convertible expressions. Every one understands the clear distinction between prose and verse, which are always placed in opposition, but it is by no means so universally perceived that verse is not necessarily poetry. Coleridge has rightly explained that poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. There is, nevertheless, as marked a difference between mere metre and true poetry, as between true

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