Latin and Mathematics are coming to be considered as a regular part of female education, throughout the North. But I have not ascertained satisfactorily, whether it is a mere smattering that is taught, or so thorough a course as may solidly improve the memory, taste, judgment and reasoning powers. In relation to women even more emphatically than to men, (it seems generally agreed) these studies are less to be prized, for any specific pieces of knowledge they furnish, than for the activity, strength, acuteness and polish, they give to the various powers of the understanding. The Yankees are too shrewd, and too habitually observant of practical utility, not to perceive this truth, and act accordingly.
The voyage hither from Albany abounds with captivating spectacles. For the first fifty miles, these consisted chiefly of waving hills, interspersed with modest but handsome country seats half-veiled by trees;—and of villages and landings, where, at intervals of four or five miles, our immense floating Hotel would halt to take in and land passengers—if halt it could be called, when her motion was not actually suspended, but only slackened, while by her boat, she rapidly communicated with the shore. The Catskill Mountains were in sight; and we were nearly entering the Highlands, so celebrated in the journal of every tourist, from Dolph Heyliger downwards, for their almost matchless combination of beauty and sublimity; when the lean "orderer of all things," for reasons best known to himself and his employers, contrived to coop us all under hatches at dinner. A slender appetite, and a surmise that there would be something worth seeing, carried me on deck before the rest were half done eating; when mountains, hemming in the majestic Hudson to a width of not more than five or six hundred yards, broke at once upon my view. They rise, from the water's very edge, within twenty or thirty degrees of the perpendicular, to a height of fourteen or fifteen hundred feet; their sides and summits undulating with various prominences and depressions, occupied by dark brown rocks, intermingled with scanty shadings of evergreens, stunted bushes, and shrubs. After sailing three or four miles between these awful embankments, we reach West Point. Here are quite too many pleasing objects, for enumeration; a skilful book-wright could make a volume of them. 'Kosciusko's Garden' is a romantic sinus, or recess, in the precipice which forms the eastern face, (upon the river) of the table land called West Point. Hither, it is said, that hero used daily to retire for meditation and repose; and a shelf in the rock is shewn, as the couch where he often reclined. Nay, within a few inches of where his head probably used to lie, an indentation in the rock is pointed out, said to have been made by a cannon ball, fired at him from a British man of war that lay in the river: but this story "wants confirmation." You descend by a flight of stone steps to the "Garden," which is only ten or fifteen feet above the river. It is furnished with wooden seats; and with a neat fountain of whitish marble, in which bubbles up a bold vein of water.
On the north-eastern angle of the "Point," around which the river somewhat abruptly sweeps, is a handsome monument, erected by the Cadets some years ago, to the same hero. It is a plain marble column, about fifteen or eighteen feet high; with no inscription save the single word "KOSCIUSKO." This simple memorial is, in moral sublimity, scarcely inferior to that conception, one of the noblest of its kind in the whole compass of poetry—
| "We carved not a line, we raised not a stone, But we left him alone with his glory." |
There are few names which can justly be relied upon, thus to speak the epitaphs of those who bore them. Among those few, doubtless, is the name of KOSCIUSKO. History, and the halo thrown around that name by Campbell, will ensure it a place among the "household words" of Poland and America, and of every people who shall speak the language or breathe the spirit of either.
| "Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell, And Freedom shrieked, as KOSCIUSKO fell!" |
To be mentioned thus, and so deservedly—is to be embalmed in Light, and set conspicuously on high in the Temple of Fame.
A similar inscription is upon the tomb of Spurzheim, in the cemetery of Mount Auburn, near Boston. To me, this seems to be taking too high a ground for him: though you, who are a phrenologist confirmed, may not think so. Possibly, you are right. Contemporary celebrity is no measure of posthumous fame. PARADISE LOST was almost unknown till near half a century after its author's death: and he was contemptuously designated as "One Milton," by a man then conspicuous, but whose very name (Whitelocke) it has at this moment actually cost me an effort to recollect. So, possibly, Spurzheim's renown may freshen with time; and a discerning posterity, honoring him above Napoleon, and even above Kosciusko, may apply the just saying of a great—that is a voluminous—poet:
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"The warrior's name, Though pealed and chimed on all the tongues of Fame, With far less rapture fills the generous mind, Than his, who fashions and improves mankind." |
Good night.