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NOT ON THE BATTLE FIELD.

BY JOHN PIERPONT.

"To fall on the battle field, fighting for my dear countrythat would not be hard.-MS. in Miss Bremer's " Neighbors."

O, no, no,-let me lie

Not on a field of battle, when I die!

Let not the iron tread

Of the mad war-horse crush my helmed head, Nor let the reeking knife,

That I have drawn against a brother'slife,

Be in my hand, when death

Thunders along, and tramples me beneath
His heavy squadron's heels,
Or gory felloes of his cannon's wheels.

From such a dying bed,

Though o'er it float the stripes of white and red, And the bald Eagle brings

The clustered stars upon his wide-spread wings, To sparkle in my sight,

O, never let my spirit take her flight.

I know that beauty's eye

Is all the brighter where gay penants fly,
And brazen helmets dance,

And sunshine flashes on the lifted lance :-
I know that bards have sung,
And people shouted, till the welkin rung,

In honor of the brave,

Who on the battle-field have found a grave;I know that, o'er their bones,

Have grateful hands piled monumental stones.

Some of these piles I've seen :-
The one at Lexington, upon the green,

Where the first blood was shed,
That to my country's independence led;
And others, on our shore,
"The battle monument," at Baltimore,
And that on Bunker's Hill,
Aye, and abroad, a few more famous still:

Thy Tomb," Themistocles,
That looks out yet upon the Grecian seas,
And which the waters kiss,

That issue from the gulf of Salamis :

And thine, too, have I seen,

The mound of earth, Patroclus, robed in green,
That, like a natural knoll,

Sheep climb and nibble over, as they stroll,
Watched by some turban'd boy,
Upon the margin of the plain of Troy.

Such honors grace the bed,

Iknow, whereon the warrior lays his head,

And hears, as life ebbs out,

The conquered flying, and the conqueror's shout.
But, as his eyes grow dim,

What is a column, or a mound, to him?
What, to the parting soul,

The mellow notes of bugles? What the roll

Of drums? No-let me die
Where the blue heaven bends o'er me lovingly,
And the soft summer air,

As it goes by me, stirs my thin, white hair,
And, from my forehead, dries

The death-damp, as it gathers, and the skies
Seem waiting to receive

My soul to their clear depths! Or, let me leave
The world, when, round my bed,

Wife, children, weeping friends are gathered,
And the calm voice of prayer

And holy hymning shall my soul prepare
To go and be at rest

With kindred spirits-spirits who have blessed
The human brotherhood

By labors, cares, and counsels for their good.

And in my dying hour,

When riches, fame, and honor, have no power
To bear the spirit up,

Or from my lips to turn aside the cup,
That all must drink, at last,

O, let me draw refreshment from the past!
Then, let my soul run back,

With peace and joy, along my earthly track,
And see that all the seeds

That I have scattered there, in virtuous deeds,
Have sprung up, and have given,
Already, fruits of which to taste is heaven!

And, though no grassy mound

Or granite pile, say 'tis heroic ground,
Where my remains repose,

Still will I hope-vain hope, perhaps !- that those
Whom I have striven to bless,-

The wanderer reclaimed, the fatherless,

May stand around my grave,

With the poor prisoner, and the poorer slave,— And breathe an humble prayer,

That they may die like him, whose bones are mouldering there.

SONNET.

BY WILLIAM W. STORY.

Be of good cheer, ye firm and dauntless few,
Whose struggle is to work an unloved good!
Ye shall be taunted by revilings rude,
Ye shall be scorned for that which ye pursue!
Yet faint not-but be ever strict and true :
Greatness must learn to be misunderstood;
And persecution is their bitter food,
Who the great promptings of the spirit do.
Though no one seem to hear, yet every word
That thou hast linked unto an earnest thought
Hath fiery wings, and shall be clearly heard
When thy frail lips to silent dust are brought.
God's guidence keeps those noble thoughts, that

chime

With the great harmony, beyond all time!

IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED.

BY WILLIAM HAZLITT.

"For the more languages a man can speak,
His talent has but sprung the greater leak:
And, for the industry he has spent upon't,
Must full as much some other way discount.
The Hebrew, Chaldee, and the Syriac,
Do, like their letters, set men's reason back,
And turn their wits that strive to understand it

learned reader to lay down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other men breathe common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources "enfeebles all internal strength of thought," as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach.

(Like those that write the characters) left handed. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or

Yet he that is but able to express

No sense at all in several languages,

Will pass for learneder than he that's known
To speak the strongest reason in his own."
The Author of Hudibras.

when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if they were the characters of an unknown tongue, till the eye closes on vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble hand! I would rather be a a wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that all day sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and at night sleeps in Elysium," than wear out my life so, 'twixt dreaming and awake. The learned author differs from the learned student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads. The learned are mere literary drudges. If you set them upon original composition, their heads turn, they know not where they are. The indefatigable readers of books are like the everlasting copiers of pictures, who, when they attempt to do any thing of their own, find they want an eye quick enough, a hand steady enough, and colours bright enough, to trace the living forms of nature.

The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand, is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him, or in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves. He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and conti- Any one who has passed through the regular granually efface one another. Learning is, in too many dations of a classical education, and is not made a cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for fool by it, may consider himself as having had a true knowledge. Books are less often made use of very narrow escape. It is an old remark, that boys "spectacles" to look at nature with, than as who shine at school do not make the greatest figure blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scene- when they grow up and come out into the world. ry from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal school, and on which his success depends, are things generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows which do not require the exercise either of the highof things reflected from the minds of others. Nature est or the most useful faculties of the mind. Memoputs him out. The impressions of real objects, ry (and that of the lowest kind) is the chief faculty stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous called into play, in conning over and repeating lesround-about descriptions, are blows that stagger sons by rote in grammar, in languages, in geography, him; their variety distracts, their rapidity exhausts arithmetic, &c., so that he who has the most of this him; and he turns from the bustle, the noise and technical memory, with the least turn for other glare and whirling motion of the world about him things, which have a stronger and more natural (which he has not an eye to follow in its fantastic claim upon his childish attention, will make the changes, nor an understanding to reduce to fixed most forward school-boy. The jargon containing principles) to the quiet monotony of the dead lan- the definitions of the parts of speech, the rules for guages, and the less startling and more intelligible casting up an account, or the inflections of a Greek combinations of the letters of the alphabet. It is verb, can have no attraction to the tyro of ten years well, it is perfectly well. "Leave me to my re- old, except as they are imposed as a task upon him pose" is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. by others, or from his feeling the want of sufficient You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his relish or amusement in other things. A lad with a chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a mira-sickly constitution, and no very active mind, who cle, to take up his bed and walk," as expect the can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has

as

not of men or things. He thinks and cares nothing about his next-door neighbours, but he is deeply read in the tribes and castes of the Hindoos and Calmuc Tartars. Hecan hardly find his way into the next street, though he is acquainted with the exact dimensions of Constantinople and Pekin. He does not know whether his oldest acquaintance is a knave or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous lecture on all the principal characters in history. He cannot tell whether an object is black or white, round or square, and yet he is a professed master of the laws of optics and the rules of perspective. He knows as much of what he talks about, as a blind man does of colours. He cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest question, nor is he ever in the

neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy for himself, will generally be at the head of his form. An idler at school, on the other hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels the circulation of his blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a breath, and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, feel the open air in his face, look at the fields or the sky, follow a winding path, or enter with eagerness into all the little conflicts and interests of his acquaintances and friends, than doze over a musty spelling-book, repeat barbarous distichs after his master, sit so many hours pinioned to a writing-desk, and receive his reward for the loss of time and pleasure in paltry prize-medals at Christmas and Mid-right in any one of his opinions, upon any one matsummer. There is indeed a degree of stupidity which prevents children from learning the usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny academic honours. But what passes for stupidity is much oftener a want of interest, of a sufficient motive to fix the attention, and force a reluctant application to the dry and unmeaning pursuits of school-learning. The best capacities are as much above this drudgery, as the dullest are beneath it. Our men of the greatest genius have not been most distinguished for their acquirements at school or at the university.

"Th' enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever." Gray and Collins were among the instances of this wayward disposition. Such persons do not think so highly of the advantages, nor can they submit their imaginations so servilely to the trammels of strict scholastic discipline. There is a certain kind and degree of intellect in which words take root, but into which things have not power to penetrate. A mediocrity of talent, with a certain slenderness of moral constitution, is the soil that produces the most brilliant specimens of successful prize-essayists and Greek epigrammatists. It should not be forgotten, that the most equivocal character among modern politicians was the eleverest boy at Eton.

Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally known to others, and which we can only derive at second-hand from books, or other artificial sources. The knowledge of that which is before us or about us, which appeals to our experience, passions and pursuits, to the bosoms and businesses of men, is not learning. Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know. He is the most learned man who knows the most of what is farthest removed from common life and actual observation, that is of the least practical utility, and least liable to be brought to the test of experience, and that, having been handed down through the greatest number of intermediate stages, is the most full of uncertainty, difficulties, and contradictions. It is seeing with the eyes of others, hearing with their ears, and pinning our faith on their understandings. The learned man prides himself in the knowledge of names and dates,

ter of fact that really comes before him, and yet he
gives himself out for an infallible judge on all those
points of which it is impossible that he or any other
person living should know anything but by conjec-
ture. He is expert in all the dead and most of the
living languages; but he can neither speak his own
fluently, nor write it correctly. A person of this
class, the second Greek scholar of his day, undertook
to point out several solecisms in Milton's Latin
style; and in his own performance there is hardly a
sentence of common Engligh. Such was Dr.
Such is Dr. Such was not Porson. He was
an exception that confirmed the general rule,—a man
that, by uniting talents and knowledge with learn-
ing, made the distinction between them more strik-
ing and palpable.

A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them. "Books do not teach the use of books." How should he know anything of a work, who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parroted others. He can translate the same word into ten different languages, but he knows nothing of the thing which it means in any one of them. He stuffs his head with authorities built on authorities, with quotations quoted from quotations, while he locks up his senses, his understanding, and his heart. He is unacquainted with the maxims and manners of the world; he is to seek in the characters of individuals. He sees no beauty in the face of nature or of art. To him the mighty world of eye and ear" is hid; and "knowledge," except at one entrance, "quite shut out." His pride takes part with his ignorance; and his self-importance rises with the number of things of which he does not know the value, and which he therefore despises as unworthy of his notice. He knows nothing of pictures;—“ of the colouring of Titian, the grace of Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, the corregiescity of Correggio, the learning of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the Caracci, or the grand contour of Michael

daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture. The common people have the use of their limbs; for they live by their labour or skill. They understand their own business, and the characters of those they have to deal with; for it is necessary that they should. They have eloquence to express their passions, and wit at will to express their contempt and provoke laughter. Their natural use of speech is not hung up in monumental mockery, in an obsolete language; nor is their sense of what is ludicrous, or readiness at finding out allusions to express it, buried in collections of Anas. You will hear more good things on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the Undergraduates or Heads of Colleges of that famous university; and more home truths are to be learnt from listening to a noisy debate in an ale-house, than from attending to a formal one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman will often know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more amusing anecdotes taken from the history of what has been said, done, and gossiped in a country town for the last fifty years, than the best

Angelo,' ," of all those glories of the Italian and mira- ¡ stand, is confined to a very small compass; to their cles of the Flemish school, which have filled the eyes of mankind with delight, and to the study and imitation of which thousands have in vain devoted their lives. These are to him as if they had never been, a mere dead letter, a by-word; and no wonder: for he neither sees nor understands their prototypes in nature. A print of Ruben's Watering-place, or Claude's Enchanted Castle, may be hanging on the walls of his room for months without his once perceiving them; and if you point them out to him, he will turn away from them. The language of nature or of art (which is another nature) is one that he does not understand. He repeats indeed the names of Apelles and Phidias, because they are to be found in classic authors, and boasts of their works as prodigies, because they no longer exist; or when he sees the finest remains of Grecian art actually before him in the Elgin marbles, takes no other interest in them than as they lead to a learned dispute, and (which is the same thing) a quarrel about the meaning of a Greek particle. He is equally ignorant of music; he knows no touch of it," from the strains of the all-accomplished Mozart to the shepherd's pipe upon the mountain. His ears are nailed to his books; and deadened with the sound of the Greek and Latin tongues, and the din and smithery of school-blue-stocking of the age will be able to glean from learning. Does he know anything more of poetry? He knows the number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse, but whether either is worth the trouble, he leaves to the critics. Does he understand the act and practique part of life" better than the theorique?" No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art; no trade or occupation; no game of skill or chance. Learning has no skill in surgery," in agriculture, in building, in working in wood or in iron; it cannot make any instrument of labour, or use it when made; it cannot handle the plough or the spade, or the chisel or the hammer; it knows nothing of hunting or hawking, fishing or shooting, of horses or dogs, of fencing or dancing, or cudgel-playing, or bowls, or cards, or tennis, or anything else. The learned professor of all arts and sciences cannot reduce any one of them to practice, though he may contribute an account of them to an Encyclopædia. He has not the use of his hands or of his feet; he can neither run, nor walk, nor swim; and he considers all those who actually understand and can exercise any of those arts of body or mind, as vulgar and mechanical men;-though to know almost any one of them in perfection requires long time and practice, with powers originally fitted, and a turn of mind particularly devoted to them. It does not require more than this to enable the learned candidate to arrive, by painful study, at a Doctor's degree and a fellowship, and to eat, drink, and sleep the rest of his life!

that sort of learning which consists in an acquaintance with all the novels and satirical poems published in the same period. People in towns, indeed, are woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only in the bust, not as a whole-length. People in the country not only know all that has happened to a man, but trace his virtues or vices, as as they do his features, in their descent through several generations, and solve some contradiction in his behaviour by a cross in the breed, half a century ago. The learned know nothing of the matter, either in town or country. Above all, the mass of society have common sense, which the learned in all ages want. The vulgar are in the right when they judge for themselves; they are wrong when they trust to their blind guides. The celebrated nonconformist divine, Baxter, was almost stoned to death by the good women of Kidderminster, for asserting from the pulpit that "hell was paved with infants' skulls;" but by the force of argument, and of learned quotations from the Fathers, the reverend preacher at length prevailed over the scruples of his congregation, and over reason and humanity.

Such is the use which has been made of human learning. The labourers in this vineyard seem as if it was their object to confound all common sense, and the distinctions of good and evil, by means of traditional maxims and preconceived notions, taken upon trust, and increasing in absurdity with increase of age. They pile hypothesis on hypothesis, mountain-high, till it is impossible to come at the plain truth on any question. They see things not as they The thing is plain. All that men really under- are, but as they find them in books; and "wink and

GO FORTH INTO THE FIELDS.

BY WILLIAM J. PABODIE.

Go forth into the fields,

To soothe the wearied heart.

Leave ye the feverish strife,
The jostling, eager, self-devoted throng;-
Ten thousand voices, waked anew to life,
Call you with sweetest song.

Hark! from each fresh clad bough,
Or blissful soaring in the golden air,
Glad birds, with joyous music, bid you now
To Spring's loved haunts repair.

shut their apprehensions up," in order that they may discover nothing to interfere with their prejudices, or convince them of their absurdity. It might be supposed, that the height of human wisdom consisted in maintaining contradictions, and rendering non-Ye dwellers in the city's troubled mart! sense sacred. There is no dogma, however fierce or Go forth and know the influence nature yields, foolish, to which these persons have not set their seals, and tried to impose on the understandings of their followers, as the will of Heaven, clothed with all the terrors and sanctions of religion. How little has the human understanding been directed to find out the true and useful! How much ingenuity has been thrown away in the defence of creeds and systems! How much time and talents have been wasted in theological controversy, in law, in politics, in verbal criticism, in judicial astrology, and in finding out the art of making gold! What actual benefit do we reap from the writings of a Laud or a Whitgift, or of Bishop Bull or Bishop Waterland, or Prideaux' Connections, or Beausobre, or Calmet, or St. Augustine, or Puffendorf, or Vattel, or from the more literal but equally learned and unprofitable labours of Scaliger, Cardan, and Scioppius? How many grains of sense are there in their thousand folio or quarto volumes? What would the world lose, if they were committed to the flames to-morrow? Or are they not already "gone to the vault of all the Capulets?" Yet all these were oracles in their time, and would have scoffed at you or me, at common sense and human nature, for differing with them. It is our turn to laugh now.

To conclude this subject. The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be. Women have often more of what is called good sense than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly and naturally. They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all. They do not think or speak by rule; and they have in general more eloquence and wit, as well as sense, on that account. By their wit, sense, and eloquence together, they generally contrive to govern their husbands. Their style, when they write to their friends, (not for the booksellers,) is better than that of most authors. Uneducated people have most exuberance of invention, and the greatest freedom from prejudice. Shakespear's was evidently an uneducated mind, both in the freshness of his imagination, and in the variety of his views; as Milton's was scholastic, in the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. Shakespear had not been accustomed to write themes at school in favour of virtue or against vice. To this we owe the unaffected, but healthy tone of his dramatic morality. If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespear. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

The silvery-gleaming rills
Lure, with soft murmurs, from the grassy lea,
Or, gaily dancing down the sunny hills,
Call loudly in their glee!

And the young wanton breeze,
With breath all odorous from her blossomy chase,
In voice low whispering 'mong the embowering trees,
Woos you to her embrace.

Go-breathe the air of heaven,

| Where violets meekly smile upon your way;
Or on some pine-crowned summit, tempest-river,
Your wandering footsteps stay.

Seek ye the solemn wood,
Whose giant trunks a verdant roof uprear,
And listen while the roar of some far flood

Thrills the young leaves with fear!

Stand by the tranquil lake,
Sleeping 'mid rocky banks abrupt and high,
Save when the wild-bird's wing its surface break,
Chequering the mirrored sky;—

And if within your breast
Hallowed to nature's touch, one chord remain ;
If aught save worldly honors find you blest,
Or hope of sordid gain-

A strange delight shall thrill,
A quiet joy brood o'er you like a dove;
Earth's placid beauty shall your bosom fill,
Stirring its depths with love.

O, in the calm, still hours,
The holy sabbath hours, when sleeps the air,
And heaven, and earth, decked with her beauteous
flowers,

Lie hushed in breathless prayer;

Pass ye the proud fane by,
The vaulted aisles, by flaunting folly trod,
And, 'neath the temple of the uplifted sky,

Go forth and worship God!

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