instead of being prematurely crammed with, to it, lifeless moral and religious principles, 'useful' knowledge, and the sciences. Wholesome to every one would be such 'Recollections of the Arabian Nights' as are expressed by Tennyson: 'Far off, and where the lemon-grove In closest coverture upsprung, The living airs of middle night Died round the bulbul as he sung; Not he: but something which possessed The darkness of the world, delight, Life, anguish, death, immortal love, Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed, Apart from place, withholding time, But flattering the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid.' A child cannot be made virtuous by maxims. The life which is before it, is not a scheme to be taught, but a drama to be acted. Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail Against her beauty? May she mix With men and prosper! Who shall fix Her pillars? Let her work prevail. But What is she, cut from love and faith, But some wild Pallas from the brain Of Demons? Let her know her place; She is the second, not the first. Man must grow not alone in power And knowledge, but by year and hour In reverence and in charity. Blessings upon all the books that are the delight of childhood and youth and unperverted manhood! Precious are the sympathetic tears which dim the page and which it is so wholesome to encourage in early life as a check to the growth of selfishness and egoism. 'Who,' writes George Sand, in her 'Lettres d'un Voyageur,' 'does not remember with delight, the first books which he relished and devoured? Has never an old dusty cover of some volume found upon the shelves of a neglected closet, brought back to your mind the lovely pictures of early years? Are you not again, in fancy, seated in the green meadow bathed in the evening sunlight, where you read it for the first time?' What galleries of sweet, pathetic, inspiriting, and noble pictures, have been prepared for the modern child!--pictures, which time and all the damp and cold of after life cannot obscure, to those who have enjoyed them. And to what a goodly company is it the privilege of childhood and youth, and early manhood, to be admitted!--the immortal offspring of cheerful genius, whose companionship expands and strengthens and purifies the heart. But the young are lamentably debarred, in these days of excessive, and non-educating, learning, from the wholesome influences, wholesome, in the way of inducing sympathy, enthusiasm, and a play of the imagination, which the best books of the past and of the present might exert upon them. Their school tasks and examinations absorb all their time, and the accompanying worry about 'marks,' saps their minds--'Death loves a _shining_ mark.'