The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 5, November 1837Various
History
The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 5, November 1837
Various
Periodicals
It is not in us; we were fashioned here
For a more tranquil feeling, such as home
Sheds on two hearts, whose true and lasting sphere
Is round the holy hearth; hearts do not roam,
When they are pledged by the young shoots that come,
Like the green root-twigs, sweetly to renew
Our life in their dear lives, which are the sum
Of all our after being, where we view
Heaven, as the soul's fond smile those rose-lips tremble through.
WILSON CONWORTH.
NUMBER SEVEN.
I HAVE already described setting out for the law school at L----.
After a long and tedious ride over rocky hills, we arrived late in
the evening at the town. It is situated on a river, on each side of
which are meadows of the most fertile soil, one mile in breadth. On
the east side of this river, a short range of mountains rise, grand
and imposing, from the generally level face of the country about
them. Here is perhaps the finest scenery in New-England. You have
a great variety within one half hour's walk. Gardens of exotics,
well-tilled farms, more resembling gardens than farms, mountains, a
river, woods, cottages, princely edifices; here a street like a city,
and the next turn brings you into something simply rural.
Here too might be found, at a later day, the finest school in the
country, perhaps in the world, if we may judge from the talent
employed in its management, and the splendor of the scale upon
which it was got up. The founders of this school are probably in
our country the only instance on record of men who had gained high
places in the literary world, leaving all their hard-bought honors,
and the ease of professorships in the first literary institution
in the country, to embark in the thankless task of keeping school.
This school has not succeeded according to its merits--as what
school does? It enjoyed a temporary reputation and success, as long
as it was the fashion and a novelty; and after the curiosity of
the public was satisfied, it diminished, and no longer numbers its
three hundred pupils. It is the same with our clergymen. People in
our country are for ever changing their ministers. It is so with
servants, ploughs, and all machinery, moral and physical. Variety,
curiosity, experiment, are the words that govern. We are forever
tearing things to pieces, to see what they are made of, and how they
are constructed. There is not and never has been a permanent private
school in America; and our endowed academies sink and rise, and only
continue to exist, because from their legal nature they cannot die.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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