to cheer

you on,

and

you

have books and teachers to aid you; but, after all, disciplining and educating your mind must be your own work. No one can do this but yourself. And nothing in this world is of any worth which has not labor and toil as its price.

6. The first and great object of education is, to discipline the mind, to fit it for future acquisition and usefulness. Make it the first object to be able to fix and hold your attention upon your studies. He who can do this, has mastered many and great difficulties; and he who can not do it, will in vain look for success in any department of study. To effect any purpose in study, the mind must be concentrated. If any other object plays on the fancy than that which ought to be exclusively before it, the mind is divided, and both are neutralized, so as to lose their effect.

7. Patience is a virtue kindred to attention; and without it, the mind can not be said to be disciplined. Patient labor and investigation are not only essential to success in study, but are an unfailing guarantee to success. The student should learn to think and act for himself. True originality consists in doing things well, and doing them in our own way. A mind, half-educated, is generally imitating others. No man was ever great by imitation. Let it be remembered that we can not copy greatness or goodness by any effort. We must acquire them, if ever attained, by our own patience and diligence.

8. Students are in danger of neglecting the memory. It is too valuable to be neglected; for, by it, wonders are sometimes accomplished. He who has a memory that can seize with an iron grasp, and retain what he reads, — the ideas, simply, without the language, — and judgment to compare and balance, will scarcely fail of being distin

guished. Why has that mass of thought, observation, and experience, which is embodied in books by the multitude of minds which have gone before us, been gathered, if not. that we may use it, and stand on high ground, and push our way still farther into the boundaries and regions of knowledge?

9. Let every student reflect, that this is the time to form habits, and to begin a course of mental discipline, which, in a few years, will raise him high in the esteem and the honors of his fellow-men. Every distinguished man has traveled the same path. There is no other road to knowledge, to improvement, to distinction. This very discipline is the only thing that can bring the mind under proper subjection.

LESSON XX.

SELF-CULTURE.

CHANNING

ELF-CULTURE is something possible. It is not a

this conviction, the speaker will but declaim, and the hearer listen, without profit. There are two powers of the human soul which make self-culture possible, the self-searching and the self-forming power. We have first the faculty of turning the mind on itself; of recalling its past and watching its present operations; of learning its various capacities and susceptibilities, what it can do and bear, what it can enjoy and suffer; and of thus learning in general what our nature is, and what it is made for.

2. It is worthy of observation, that we are able to discern not only what we already are, but what we may become;

to see in ourselves germs and promises of a growth to which no bounds can be set; and that, by using the powers which God has given us, we can dart beyond what we have actually gained. But self-culture is possible, not only because we can enter into and search ourselves, but because we have a still nobler power, that of acting on, determining, and forming ourselves. This is a fearful as well as glorious endowment; for it is the ground of human responsibility. We have the power not only of tracing our powers, but of guiding and impelling them; not only of watching our passions, but of controlling them; not only of seeing our faculties grow, but of applying to them means and influences to aid their growth.

3. We can stay or change the current of thought. We can concentrate the intellect on objects which we wish to comprehend. We can fix our eyes on perfection, and make almost every thing speed us toward it. Of all the discoveries which men need to make, the most important, at the present moment, is that of the self-forming power treasured up in themselves. They little suspect its extent, — as little as the savage apprehends the energy which the mind is created to exert on the material world. It transcends in importance all our power over outward nature. There is more divinity in it than in the force which impels the outward universe; and yet how little we comprehend it! How it slumbers in most men unsuspected, unused! This makes self-culture possible, and binds it on us as a solemn duty.

4. To cultivate any thing- be it a plant, an animal, or a mind is to make it grow. Growth, expansion, is the end. Nothing admits culture but that which has a principle of life capable of being expanded. He, therefore, who does what he can to unfold all his powers and

capacities, especially his nobler ones, so as to become a well-proportioned, vigorous, excellent, happy being, practices self-culture.

5. Self-culture is moral. When a man looks into himself, he discovers two distinct orders or kinds of principles, which it behooves him especially to comprehend. He discovers desires, appetites, passions, which terminate in himself; which crave and seek his own interest, gratification, distinction; and he discovers another principle, in opposition to these, which is impartial, disinterested, universal, — enjoining on him a regard to the rights and happiness of other beings, and laying on him obligations which must be discharged, cost what they may, or however they may clash with his particular pleasure or gain.

6. No man, however narrowed to his own interest, however hardened by selfishness, can deny that there springs up within him a great idea, in opposition to interest, — the idea of duty; that an inward voice calls him, more or less distinctly, to revere and exercise impartial justice and universal good will. This disinterested principle in human nature we call sometimes reason, sometimes conscience, sometimes the moral sense or faculty.

7. But, be its name what it may, it is a real principle in each of us, and it is the supreme power within us, to be cultivated above all others; for on its culture the right development of all others depends. The passions, indeed, may be stronger than the conscience, may lift up a louder voice; but their clamor differs wholly from the tone of command in which the conscience speaks. They are not clothed with its authority, its binding power. In their very triumphs they are rebuked by the moral principle, and often cower before its still, deep, menacing voice.

8. No part of self-knowledge is more important than to

discern clearly these two great principles, the self-seeking and the disinterested; and the most important part of selfculture is to depress the former and to exalt the latter, or to enthrone the sense of duty within us. There are no limits to the growth of this moral force in man, if he will cherish it faithfully. There have been men whom no power in the universe could turn from the right; to whom death, in its most dreadful forms, has been less dreaded than transgression of the inward law of universal justice and love.

D

LESSON XXI.

THE SKATER AND THE WOLVES.

WHITEHEAD.

URING the winter of 1844, being in the northern part

of Maine, I had much leisure to devote to the sports of a new country. To none of these was I more passionately addicted than to skating. The deep and sequestered lakes, frozen by the intense cold of a northern winter, present a wide field to the lover of this pastime. Often would I bind on my skates, glide away up the glittering river, and wind each mazy streamlet that flowed, beneath its fetters, on toward the parent ocean, with exultant joy and delight. Sometimes these excursions were made by moonlight; and it was on one of these latter occasions that I had a rencounter, which even now I can not recall without a thrill of horror.

2. I had left my friend's house one evening just before dusk, with the intention of skating a short distance up the Kennebec, which glided directly before the door. The night was beautifully clear. The peerless moon rode