to the liveliness of
the sensibility, and strong as the strength of the imagination. Every
age hath abounded in instances of parents, kindred, and friends, who, by
indirect influence of example, or by positive injunction and
exhortation, have diverted or discouraged the youth, who, in the
simplicity and purity of nature, had determined to follow his
intellectual genius through good and through evil, and had devoted
himself to knowledge, to the practice of virtue and the preservation of
integrity, in slight of temporal rewards. Above all, have not the common
duties and cares of common life at all times exposed men to injury from
causes the action of which is the more fatal from being silent and
unremitting, and which, wherever it was not jealously watched and
steadily opposed, must have pressed upon and consumed the diviner
spirit?

There are two errors into which we easily slip when thinking of past
times. One lies in forgetting in the excellence of what remains the
large overbalance of worthlessness that has been swept away. Ranging
over the wide tracts of antiquity, the situation of the mind may be
likened to that of a traveller[26] in some unpeopled part of America,
who is attracted to the burial place of one of the primitive
inhabitants. It is conspicuous upon an eminence, 'a mount upon a mount!'
He digs into it, and finds that it contains the bones of a man of mighty
stature; and he is tempted to give way to a belief, that as there were
giants in those days, so all men were giants. But a second and wiser
thought may suggest to him that this tomb would never have forced itself
upon his notice, if it had not contained a body that was distinguished
from others,--that of a man who had been selected as a chieftain or
ruler for the very reason that he surpassed the rest of his tribe in
stature, and who now lies thus conspicuously inhumed upon the
mountain-top, while the bones, of his followers are laid unobtrusively
together in their burrows upon the plain below. The second habitual
error is, that in this comparison of ages we divide time merely into
past and present, and place these in the balance to be weighed against
each other; not considering that the present is in our estimation not
more than a period of thirty years, or half a century at most, and that
the past is a mighty accumulation of many such periods, perhaps the
whole of recorded time, or at least the whole of that portion of it in
which our own country ha