To make the practical application of this, let us suppose that two or three years are all that can be given, in some places, to common-school education. A part of this time is necessarily occupied with the very elements of knowledge, reading, writing, and numbers. How shall we best employ the residue? One plan is to give it up wholly to practical knowledge, as it is called, or what is supposed to have an immediate connection with the active business of life, although greatly overrated even in this respect. Another would devote it to as good an acquaintance as can be formed with the best things in the best English classics—and this by a course of well-directed reading, or, as the Greek boys were required to do in respect to their poets, by committing largely to memory. It would be well if time could be given to both. But this, we will suppose, can not be done, and we are to decide between the rival claims. Can there be a doubt as to who is likely to be the useful man, the healthy-souled man, the sound man, in the best sense of the terms? Can we doubt as to who will have the richest store laid up for that future thinking and future feeling which is the true life of the soul—the boy whose precious time has been given to a little physiology, a little natural history, a little of that trash which sometimes goes under the name of meteorology, all forgotten as soon as learned, because never learned either philosophically or scientifically—or he whose mind has been brought in as close communion as possible with the richest, the most elevated, the most beautiful thinking in English literature—with Milton, with Shakspeare, with Young, with Addison, with Johnson, with Cowper, with Irving, with Wordsworth, and, above all, that "well of English undefined," as well as mine of thought unfathomable—The Holy Scriptures?
But we can not pursue this train of thought farther at present. At some other period we may attempt to fill up these outline ideas with some more particular and varied illustrations. We should like, especially, to call attention to the subject of school-books for our primary institutions. It may strike some as rather a humble theme, and yet there are but few of higher practical importance.
[Editor's Easy Chair.]
If ever, in the chronicle of any year, the old Georgic averment of "semper imbres" might be written truthfully, it certainly must belong to that weeping April which made the middle of our slow-coming spring.
Forty days of rain were once reckoned a drowning punishment for a sinning world; and if equal dampness is any test of our present demerit, there was never a wickeder world than ours.
It is easy, in our office-chair, to talk humorsomely of the floods which, since our last writing, have carried off the last white stains of winter. But a bitterer truthfulness lies in the woes and losses that the rains have showered upon thousands of the poor than we are wont to take cognizance of.
It is a pretty thing to see—as we have seen—the mountain rivulets growing white and angry, and swelling into great torrents that run writhing around the heel of mossy rocks, and start the mouldering logs that bridged them, into sharp-flung javelins that twist and dash along the growing tide; and it is grand to see the lithe saplings that border such maddened streamlet, dipping their sappy limbs, and struggling, and torn away by the chafing waters; and it is like a poem—richer than any tame pastoral—to listen to the rush and whirl bearing down scathed tree-trunks, and mossy boulders, and loitering with a hissing laziness in some spreading eddy at the foot of a mountain-slope: but it is terrible, when the rush of a thousand such streams has doubled the volume of a river, and drowned the sweet spring banks, and borne off struggling flocks, and rose to the level of firesides—deluging gardens and families—spreading through the streets of a town like a reeling monster of a thousand heads, lifting its yellow ghastliness into chambers, and rocking from their foundations rural homes, and swaying the topmost limbs of fruit trees that shadow the roof.
All this, it has been our lot, once in our life to see;—when panic seized the strongest-minded, and fathers crowded their crying households into tottering skiffs that went rocking and doubtful over the swift eddies among bent forest trees—bearing within them the poor remnant of the husbandman's estate. And just such scenes, if report speak true, have startled the men and women of Western Pennsylvania, and have made this year of 1852 a sad epoch in their history.
But we turn from this gladly to the bursting summer, which, with Minerva's suddenness, has leaped from the cleft skull of winter. In a week the flower-trees have put on bloom, and the grass caught its cloak of greenness. Why is it, that thus far we have no Virgil, or no prose pastoral to tell of the wondrous things which adorn the American spring and summer? If quick and gorgeous contrasts be any item in the sum of what makes up the beauty of a country, we have no rivals in the world; and we can show the gorgeous glassiness of ice, as wondrous in its adornments as are the silvan graces of our prairie wood. The time will come, by-and-by when the ocean-crossing shall be a matter counted by hours instead of days, when the searchers after the wonderful will gaze upon the ice-beauties of Niagara as they now feast on its summer.