e energies he puts forth,
he may close every day, sometimes with a faint shadow of success, and
sometimes with entire and blank miscarriage. And the latter will happen
ten thousand times, for once that the undertaking shall be blessed with
a prosperous event.

But, when the destination that is given to a child has been founded
upon a careful investigation of the faculties, tokens, and accidental
aspirations which characterise his early years, it is then that
every step that is made with him, becomes a new and surer source of
satisfaction. The moment the pursuit for which his powers are adapted is
seriously proposed to him, his eyes sparkle, and a second existence, in
addition to that which he received at his birth, descends upon him. He
feels that he has now obtained something worth living for. He feels
that he is at home, and in a sphere that is appropriately his own. Every
effort that he makes is successful. At every resting-place in his
race of improvement he pauses, and looks back on what he has done with
complacency. The master cannot teach him so fast, as he is prompted to
acquire.

What a contrast does this species of instruction exhibit, to the
ordinary course of scholastic education! There, every lesson that is
prescribed, is a source of indirect warfare between the instructor and
the pupil, the one professing to aim at the advancement of him that
is taught, in the career of knowledge, and the other contemplating
the effect that is intended to be produced upon him with aversion, and
longing to be engaged in any thing else, rather than in that which is
pressed upon his foremost attention. In this sense a numerous school
is, to a degree that can scarcely be adequately described, the
slaughter-house of mind. It is like the undertaking, related by Livy,
of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor--with this
difference, that our modern schoolmasters are not endowed with the gift
of working miracles, and, when the experiment falls into their hands,
the result of their efforts is a pitiful miscarriage. Knowledge is
scarcely in any degree imparted. But, as they are inured to a dogged
assiduity, and persist in their unavailing attempts, though the shell
of science, so to speak, is scarcely in the smallest measure penetrated,
yet that inestimable gift of the author of our being, the sharpness of
human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed, that it can scarcely ever
be usefully employed even for those