I hope the article will be widely reprinted in our own country. Its tendency is most beneficial. We are, from necessity, in the present point of our developement, a hard working, practical, matter-of-fact people—full—too full of mere worldly occupation and excitement. Subjects in no way connected with the higher exercise of the intellect absorb the public mind. Commercial and political questions unavoidably monopolize the national sympathies. We are compelled at present to strain every nerve to _make money_, that the ravages of the monetary tempest which has swept like a tornado or an earthquake, or an oriental plague over our land, may be repaired. There is danger in this state of things that we entirely forego the contemplation of those subjects, which, however without temporal pecuniary profit, repay the laborer with moral purity and elevation, which soften the asperity of the passions, infuse gentleness and liberality into opinion, strengthen the spiritual part of our nature, and ennoble and dignify life—at the same time that they cheer, guide, protect and sweeten it. There is no repose, no patient leisure and calm tranquillity in our young and rapidly growing country. There is the same difference, I mean in respect to literary and scientific pursuits, between us and some of the European communities, Germany for instance, that there was between the Israelites travelling through the desert and the same people when gathered around the temple in the holy city. I believe we, too, are undergoing a kind of forty years’ penance, in order to shake off such of the habits and opinions of our European ancestors as are wrong—six thousand years of bloody prejudices and political errors. There will come a day of prosperity, when institutions shall be no longer doubtful, national character no longer unsettled, when we shall have a fixed standard of political morals far different from any that has hitherto prevailed in the world; and when the human mind, under these more favorable circumstances, will develop itself in a new manner.