Parents, when you have imparted to your children habits and tastes, like these, you have bequeathed them an intellectual fortune, which few changes can take away; and which is as strictly independent, as anything earthly can be. You have unlocked to their gratuitous use perennial fountains of innocent and improving enjoyment. You have secured them forever against the heart-wearing gloom of _ennui_, insufficiency to themselves, and slavish dependence upon others for amusement. Spend as lavishly as you may, in multiplying fashionable instructers, and blazon, as much as you will, the advantages of your children; if they do not perceive, while the rudiments of their taste and habits are forming, that you consider literature, science and the improvement of intellect a matter of paramount interest and importance, you will never cause their stream to flow higher, than your fountain. An occasional parlor lecture, or a high wrought eulogy, will not convince them, or avail to your purpose. They must see this preference, as all others, which they will be inclined to copy, manifested in your whole deportment and conversation. But, while I am convinced, that parents will find efforts to train their children to be highly intellectual, rowing against the current, unless they evince, themselves, by their habitual examples, that they consider it a higher attainment, to possess literature and conversational powers, than fashion, or wealth or the common objects of pursuit, in other words, that all efficient education must be essentially domestic, I would not be understood to undervalue public schools and colleges. I am aware, that in these places are best imparted the knowledge and adroitness that fit them for the keen scramble of ambitious competition. But in regard to those boys who leave their competitions behind the classes of the university, I think on examination, we shall find, that the germ and the stamina of this progress were early communicated by instruction and example at home. At table, around the evening fire, in the Sabbath walk, in the common family intercourse, in the intervals of the toil of your profession, whatever it be, the taste and the permanent inclination for literature and intellectual cultivation are imparted. This can never be, if behind all your eulogy of these things, you discover, that your ruling passion is money, or the sordid objects of common pursuit. Note 34, page 124.