MY STUDENT LIFE AT HOFWYL. There flourished, in the heart of the Swiss Republic, during some twenty or twenty-five years, commencing about the year 1810, an educational institution, in the nature of a private college, which, though it attracted much public attention at the time, being noticed with commendation, as I remember, in a report made by the Count Capo d'Istria to the Emperor Alexander of Russia, yet has never, I think, been appreciated at its full deserts, nor generally recognized for the admirable institution it was,--unparalleled, in the character of the spirit which pervaded it, and in many of the practical results obtained, by any establishment for learning that has ever come under my observation. I was educated there, from the age of sixteen or seventeen to twenty. Passing into its tranquil scenes from the quiet of home and the hands of a private tutor, with the sunny hopes and high ideal and scanty experience of youth, much that I found there appeared to me at the time but natural and in the ordinary course of things, which now, by the light of a life's teachings, and by comparison with the realities as I have found them, seems to me, as I look back, rather in the nature of a dream of fancy, tinged with the glamour of optimism, than like the things one really meets with in the work-a-day world. I say this, after making what I think due allowance for the Claude-Lorraine tints in which youth is wont to invest its early recollections. It was one of several public institutions for education founded by the benevolent enterprise of a very remarkable man. EMANUEL VON FELLENBERG was born of a patrician family of Bern. His father had been a member of the Swiss Government, and a friend of the celebrated Pestalozzi,--a friendship which descended to the son. His mother was a descendant of the stout Van Tromp, the Dutch admiral, who was victor in more than thirty engagements, and whose spirit and courage she is said to have inherited. To this noble woman young Fellenberg owed ideas of liberty and philanthropy beyond the age in which he lived and the aristocratic class to which he belonged. Educated at Colmar and Tuebingen, the years immediately succeeding his college life were spent in travels, which brought him, at the age of twenty-three, and just after the death of Robespierre, to Paris, where he had an opportunity of studying men in the subsiding tumult of a terrible revolution.