'Twas midnight—On the mountains brown
The cold round moon shone deeply down
Blue rolled the waters, blue the sky
Spread like an ocean hung on high;
Bespangled with those isles of light,
So widely, spiritually bright.
Who ever gazed upon them shining,
And turned to earth without repining!
The sea on either shore lay there,
Calm, clear, and azure as the air;
And scarce the foam the pebbles shook,
That murmured meekly as the brook.
The winds were pillowed on the waves;
The banners drooped along their staves;
And that deep silence was unbroke,
Save where the watch his signal spoke;
Save where the steed neighed oft and shrill,
And echo answered from the hill.
Siege of Corinth.
Our concluding example is from the Scriptures. We challenge not for it a superiority simply on the ground of its inspiration. Every reader may judge for himself how immeasurably it excels any thing of the kind to be found in ancient or modern poetry. How full of natural sublimity, and, at the same time, how profoundly impressive the moral lesson of this night scene from Job!
In thoughts from visions of the night,
When deep sleep falleth upon men,
Fear came upon me, and trembling,
And made all my bones to shake.
Then a spirit passed before my face;
The hair of my flesh rose up.
It stood. An image was before mine eyes,
And yet I could not discern the form thereof.
There was silence—
And yet I heard a voice—saying—
Shall a mortal be more just than God?
Shall a man be more pure than his Maker?
We hear often of popular fallacies. Books have been written on them. But there are also learned fallacies, and among these we know of no one more common than that which prevails respecting the word education. It is quite usual with lecturers and essayists to derive a profound philosophical meaning from the bare etymology of the term. It is from educo, they tell us, to lead or draw out. It means the drawing out or developing the faculties. It is the bringing out the unwrought man, like the polished statue from the rough block of marble. All sorts of changes are rung upon the word. With some it is the educing of the individuality, with others, of the humanity. Others again talk much of drawing out the ideas, and that, too, without any previous exact instruction, or the furnishing of what might be styled the prepared material of thought—about as wise a course as to attempt to develop, or draw out the faculties of a nail-making machine, without ever thinking of putting any well-wrought iron into it. Now, all this is pedantic nonsense. The old Roman Roundheads, from whom the term is derived, never dreamed of any such transcendental conception. The word, in its primary sense, simply means nursing, fostering, rearing. Hence is it afterward applied to knowledge and discipline. It is educed from the simple conception of holding the child by the hand, and leading him forth when he first begins to walk. From the same primitive thought comes the word pedagogue, which simply means, one who leads a boy, and was first applied to the slave, or servant, who conducted the Athenian child to and from school. It would, however, be hardly worth our while to show the fallacy of this very common etymological deduction, were it not sometimes made the ground of very false ideas. The old view, although it have no great philosophy, will be found to be the true one. It is to hold a child up, and lead him forth by the hand, before you set him to walk alone by himself, under pretense of developing his faculties, either of thinking or of locomotion.
Every man has two parents, four grand-parents, eight great-grand-parents, sixteen great-great-grand-parents, &c., &c., &c. If we reckon 30 years to a generation, and carry on the above series to the time of the Norman conquest, it will be found that each one of us must have had at that period, no less than 32,000,000 of ancestors. Now, making all allowance for the crossing of genealogical lines, and consequently for the same person being in many of the intersections, still there will remain a number sufficient, at that period, to cover the whole Norman and Anglo-Saxon race. Whatever, therefore, was then noble, or pious, or princely, or even kingly, stands somewhere in the line of ancestry of the most ignoble and plebeian among us. Each man of the present day may be almost certain of having had, not only earls (and it may be bishops), but even crowned heads among his progenitors. And so also may we be almost assured that the highest families of that period have now lineal representatives in persons so low in the social scale, that all the sounding lines of heraldry would fail to fathom the depth of their obscurity. In less than a thousand years, the blood of Victoria inevitably mingles with that of some of the most ignoble of the earth. Carry the calculation further back, and we soon pass beyond any population that ever existed on our globe. A thousand years from the present time brings the number up to 1,024,000,000. Two or three centuries more carries it beyond a thousand billions, and long before we arrive at the period of our world's creation, it would have reached a number surpassing all powers of easy enumeration. It is a consequence, too, of the same view, that a thousand years hence, each man who has now an ordinary family of children, will probably have a representative some way of his blood in each one of 30,000,000 of persons; and that these will be of all conditions, high and low, rich and poor, unless, as may be the case, some system of social philosophy may long before that have swept all distinctions from our world.
[Editor's Drawer.]
The "monitory season" of Nature has come. The faded garniture of the fields; the many-colored, gorgeous woods; the fitful winds, sighing for the flowers "whose fragrance late they bore:" the peculiar yellow-green of the sky at the horizon, in the twilight gloaming; all these proclaim that "summer is ended" and autumn is here. Brainard, a poet of true tenderness and feeling, once asked, "What is there saddening in the autumn leaf?" Perhaps it would be difficult to tell what it is, but that it is saddening, in the midst of its dying beauty, most persons have felt. One of our own poets, too early called away,[10] wrote many years since, on the first day of October, the following sad and tender lines:
"Solemn, yet beautiful to view,
Month of my heart! thou dawnest here,
With sad and faded leaves to strew
The Summer's melancholy bier;
The moaning of thy winds I hear,
As the red sunset dies afar,
And bars of purple clouds appear,
Obscuring every western star.