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LESSON LI.

NOTE.-The following poetry was written when the author,

"The marvelous boy,

The sleepless soul that perished in his pride,"

was only eleven years of age.

HYMN OF PRAISE TO THE CREATOR.

THOMAS CHATTERTON.

1. ALMIGHTY FRAMER of the skies,

O let our pure devotion rise
Like incense in Thy sight!
Wrapt in impenetrable shade,

The texture of our souls was made,
Till Thy command gave light.

2. The Sun of glory gleamed, the ray
Refined the darkness into day,
And bid the vapors fly.
Impelled by His eternal love,
He left His palaces above,
To cheer our gloomy sky.

3. How shall we celebrate the day,
When Christ appeared in mortal clay,
The mark of worldly scorn?
When the archangels' heavenly lays
Attempted the Redeemer's praise,
And hailed Salvation's morn?

4. A humble form the Savior wore,
The pains of poverty He bore,
To gaudy pomp unknown;
Though in a human walk he trod,
He wrought the wonders of a God,
In glory all His own.

5. Despised, oppressed, He meekly bears
The torments of this vale of tears,

Nor bids His vengeance rise:

He saw the sons of Adam's race,
Revile His power, despise his grace,-
He saw with Mercy's eyes.

LESSON LII.

INFLUENCE OF EDUCATION ON THE HUMAN

INTELLECT.

MELVILLE.

1. In the mind of many a peasant whose every moment is bestowed on wringing from the soil a scanty subsistence, there slumber powers which, had they been evolved by early discipline, would have elevated their possessor to the first rank of philosophers; and many a mechanic who goes patiently the round of unvaried toil, is unconsciously the owner of faculties which, nursed and expanded by education, would have enabled him to electrify senates, and to win that pre-eminence which men award to the majesty of genius.

2. There arise occasions, when-peculiar circumstances aiding the development-the pent-up talent struggles loose from the trammels of poverty; and the peasant, through a sudden outbreak of mind, starts forward to the place, for which his intellect fits him. But ordinarily, the powers remain th life, bound-up and torpid; and he, therefore, forms but a c tracted estimate of the amount of high mental endowment, who reckons by the proud marbles which cause the aisles of a cathedral to breathe the memory of departed greatness, and *never thinks, when walking the village church-yard with its rude memorials of the fathers of the valley, that, possibly, there sleeps beneath his feet one who, if early taught, might have trod with a Newton's step the firmament, or swept with Milton's hand the harp-strings.

3. Aye! stand erect! nor bend thy knee, nor bow,

But speak thine own free thoughts, and with an eye,
Bold as an eagle's, cleaving the bright sky,

Hold upward thy proud way! Oh! why shouldst thou,

Whose iron arm hath made the mighty world
A realm of beauty, and subdued the wave,
O'er desert vales and mountain hights unfurled
The flag of Hope, why shouldst thou, like a slave,
Cringe to the nod of Pride, and bend thee low,
Even to the soil thy hand hath taught to bloom
As a fair garden; wherefore shouldst thou so
Bend down, and shut thy soul as in a tomb?
O, stand erect! throw fetters off, and ban,
And speak thine own free thoughts,-thou art a MAN!
R. S. ANDROS.

LESSON LIII.

HONOR DUE TO ALL MEN.

"Honor all men-Honor the king."

CHALMERS.

1. TO HONOR all men, is alike the lesson of Philosophy and Religion. He who studies humanity, not according to its accidental distinctions in society, but in its great and general characteristics,—he who looks to its moral nature as a piece of curious and interesting mechanism, forgets the distinctions of rank, in the homage which he renders to man, simply as the possessor of a constitution that has so often exercised and regaled his faculties as an object of liberal curiosity.

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2. The humblest peasant bears within himself, that very tablet, on the lines and characters of which the highest philosopher may for years, perhaps, have been most intensely gazing. All the secrets of our wondrous economy, are deposited there; and, in the heart even of the most unlettered man, the memory, the understanding, the imagination, the conscience, and every other function and property of the yet inaccessible soul, are all in busy operation. To the owner of such an unexplorable microcosm, we attach somewhat of the same reverence which we entertain for some profound and hidden mystery.

3. To think that each individual around us has within the precincts of his own bosom, a chamber of thoughts and pur

poses, and fond imaginations as warm and teeming as our own, -that every one of the immense multitude is the center of his own distinct amphitheater, which, however unknown to us, is the universe to him,--that each meditative countenance bespeaks a play of hopes, wishes, and interests within, in every way as active as we experience in ourselves,—and to think that should my own heart cease its palpitations, and were the light of my own wakeful spirit to be extinguished forever, that still there would be a world as full of life and intelligence as before, there is a humility that ought to be impressed by such a contemplation; or, it ought at least to exalt our reckoning of all men.

4. It is true, that, in what may be called the outward magnitude of these interests, there is a wide distance between a sovereign and his subject-between the cares of an empire, and the cares of a small household economy. They are a different set of objects, wherewith the monarch is conversant, and that keep in play the system of his thoughts and emotions But as the peasant is like him in respect of anatomy, so, with all the diversity of circumstances, he is substantially like him in the frame and mechanism of his spirit.

5. The outward causes, by which each is excited, are vastly different; but the inward excitement of both is the same; and, could we explore the little world that is in each of the two bosoms, we should recognize in each the same busy rotation of hopes and fears, wishes and anxieties. If it is indeed a just calculation, that there is a superiority, a surpassing worth in the moral, which far outweighs the material, then, let the cottage be as widely dissimilar from the palace as it may, there is a similiarity between their inhabitants, not in that which is minute, but in that which is momentous,—and our weightiest arguments for honoring the king, bear with efficacy upon the lesson, to "honor all men."

6. Let us rate the importance of one thinking and living spirit, when compared with all the mute and unconscious materialism which is in our universe. Without such a spirit the whole visible existence were but an idle waste-a nothingness.

For what is beauty, were there no eye to look upon it; and what is music, were there no ear to listen; and what is matter in all its rich and wondrous varieties, without a spectatormind to be regaled by the contemplation of them? One might conceive the very panorama that now surrounds us,the same earth, and sea, and skies, that we now look upon,the same graces on the face of terrestrial nature,—the same rolling wonders in the firmament,-yet without one spark of thought or animation throughout the unpeopled amplitude. This in effect were nonentity.

7. To put out all the consciousness that is in nature, were tantamount to the annihilation of nature; and the lighting up again of but one mind in the midst of this desolation, would of itself restore significancy to the scene, and be more than equivalent to the first creation of it. In other words, one living mind is of more worth than a dead universe; or there is that in every single peasant, to which I owe sublimer homage, than, if untenanted of mind, I should yield to all the wealth of this lower world, to all those worlds that roll in spacious ness and in splendor through the vastnesses of astronomy.

8. Our Savior himself hath instituted the comparison between a world and a soul; and, whether both were alike perishable or alike enduring, His estimate of the soul's superiority would hold. He founds His computation on our brief tenure of all that is earthly, and on the magnitude of those abiding interests which wait the immortal spirit in other scenes of existence. All men are immortal. There is a grandeur of destination here, that far outweighs all the pride and pretension of this world's grandeur.

9. Those lordly honors which some men fetch from the an-, tiquity of their race, are but poor indeed, when compared with that more signal honor which all men have in the eternity of their duration. In respect to immortality, the great and the small ones of the earth stand on an equal eminence; and in respect to the death which comes before it, both have to sink to the same humiliating level. The prince shares with the peasant, in the horror and lothsomeness of death,—the

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