Page images
PDF
EPUB

EXERCISE CXVIII.

ASPIRE!

1 (<) Higher, higher, ever higher,—
Let the watchword be, "Aspire !"
Noble Christian youth;

2.

3.

4.

5

Whatsoe'er be God's behest,
Try to do that duty best,

In the strength of Truth.

Let a just Ambition fire
Every motive and desire

God and Man to serve;

Man, with zeal and honor due,
God, with gratitude most true,
And all the spirit's nerve!

Let not Doubt thine efforts tire,
God will give what all require,
Ràiment, hóme, and food;
And with these, contented well,
Bid thine aspirations swell

To the Highest Good!

From the perils, deep and dire,
Of Temptation's sensual mire,

Keep thy chastened feet;
Dread, and hate, and turn away
From the lure that leads astray,
Satan's pleasure-cheat!

And, while thus a self-denier,
Stand the stalworth self-relier,-
Bravely battling on,

Though alone,--no soul alive

Ever stout y dared to strive,

But saw the battle won!

M. F. TUPPER

6. (<) Higher, then, and always higher,-
Let Man's motto be, "ASPIRE !"
Whoso'er he le;

Holy liver! happy dier!

Earth's poor best, and Heaven's choir,

Are reserved for thee!

QUESTIONS.-1. Why the rising inflection on home, third stanza ! See Rule VII., page 31. 2. How, according to the notation marks, should the first lines of the first and sixth stanzas be read? See page 40.

EXERCISE CXIX.

THE AGED.

1. I love the aged ;-every silver hair

MRS. ST. LEON LOUD.

On their time-honored brows, speaks to my heart
In language of the past; each furrow there,
In all my best affections, claims a part;
Next to our God, and Scripture's holy page,
Is deepest rev'rence due to virtuous age.

2. The aged Christian stands upon the shore Of Time, a storehouse of experience,

Filled with the treasures of rich, heav'nly lore,

I love to sit and hear him draw from thence
Sweet recollections of his journey past,-
A journey crowned with blessings to the last.

3. Lovely the aged! when, like shocks of corn,
Full ripe and ready for the reaper's hand,
Which garners for the resurrection morn

The bodies of the just,-in hope they stand.
And dead must be the heart, the bosom cold,
Which warms not with affection for the old.

EXERCISE CXX.

STUDY FAVORABLE TO ORIGINALITY.

CHARLES BUTLER.

1. A romantic girl, with a pretension to sentiment, which her still more ignorant friends mistake for genius, and pos sessing something of a natural ear, has, perhaps, in her childhood, exhausted all the images of grief, and love, and fancy, picked up in her desultory poetical reading, in an elegy on a sick linnet, or a sonnet on a dead lap-dog; she begins thenceforward to be considered as a prodigy in her little circle; surrounded with fond and flattering friends, every avenue to truth is shut out; she has no opportunity of learning that her fame is derived, not from her powers, but her position; and that, when an impartial critic shall have made all the necessary deductions, such as-that she is a neighbor, that she is a relation, that she is a female, that she is young, that she has had no advantages, that she is pretty, perhaps when her verses come to be stripped of all their extraneous appendages, and the fair author is driven off her "vantage ground" of partiality, sex, and favor, she will commonly sink to the level of ordinary capacities.

2. But those more quiet women, who have meekly sat down in the humble shades of prose and prudence, by a pa tient perseverance in rational studies, rise afterward much higher in the scale of intellect, and acquire a much larger stock of sound knowledge, for far better purposes than mere display. And though it may seem a contradiction, yet it will generally be found true, that girls who take to scribble, are the least studious, the least reflecting, and the least rational.

3. They early acquire a false confidence in their own unassisted powers; it becomes more gratifying to their natural vanity to be always pouring out their minds on paper, than to be drawing into them fresh ideas from richer sources. original stock, small, perhaps, at first, is soon spent. The subsequent efforts grow more and more feeble, if the mind

The

which is continually exhausting itself, be not, also, continually replenished; till the latter compositions become little more than reproductions of the same ideas, and fainter copies of the same images, a little varied and modified, perhaps, and not a little diluted and enfeebled.

4. It will be necessary to combat vigilantly that favorite idea of lively ignorance, that study is an enemy to originality. Correct the judgment, while you humble the vanity of the young untaught pretender, by convincing her, that those half-formed thoughts and undigested ideas, which she considers as proofs of her invention, prove only, that she wants taste and knowledge; that, while conversation must polish, and reflection invigorate, her ideas, she must improve and enlarge them by the accession of various kinds of virtue and elegant literature; and that the cultivated mind will repay with large interest the seeds sown in it by judicious study. Let it be observed, I am by no means encouraging young ladies to turn authors; I am only reminding them, that

"Authors, before they write, should read."

I am only putting them in mind, that to be ignorant is not to be original.

5. These self-taught and self-dependent scribblers pant for the unmerited and unattainable praise of fancy and of genius, while they disdain the commendation of judgment, knowledge, and perseverance, which would probably be within their reach. To extort admiration they are accustomed to boast of an impossible rapidity in composing; and, while they insinuate how little time their performances cost them, they intend you should infer how perfect they might have made them, had they condescended to the drudgery of application; but application, with them, implies defect of genius.

6. They take superfluous pains to convince you, that there was neither learning nor labor in the work for which they solicit your praise. Alas! the judicious eye too soon per ceives it! though t does not perceive, that native strength

and mother-wit, which, in works of real genius, make some amends for the negligence, which yet they do not justify.

7. But, instead of extolling these effusions for their facility, it would be kind in friends rather to blame them for their crudeness; and, when the young candidates for fame are eager to prove in how short a time such a poem has been struck off, it would be well to regret, that they had not either taken a longer time, or refrained from writing at all; as, in the former case, the work would have been less defective, and, in the latter, the writer would have discovered more hu mility and self-distrust.

EXERCISE CXXI.

GENIUS.

E. P. WHIPPLE.

1. There is one law inwoven into the constitution of things, which declares, that force of mind and character must rule the world. This truth glares out upon us from daily life, from history, from science, art, letters, from all the agencies which influence conduct and opinion. The whole existing order of things is one vast monument to the supremacy of mind. The exterior appearance of human life is but the material embodiment, the substantial expression of thought, the hieroglyphic writing of the soul.

[ocr errors]

2. The fixed facts of society, laws, institutions, positive knowledge, were once ideas in a projector's brain,-thoughts which have been forced into facts. The scouted hypothesis

of the fifteenth century is the time-honored institution of the nineteenth; the heresy of yesterday is the common-place of to-day. We perceive in every stage of this great movement, a certain vital force, a spiritual power, to which we give the name of genius.

3. From the period when our present civilized races ran

« PreviousContinue »