erlooked in that stage of life when youth is passing into
manhood--overlooked, or forgotten. We now apply for the succour which we
need to a faculty that works after a different course; that faculty is
reason; she gives more spontaneously, but she seeks for more; she works
by thought through feeling; yet in thoughts she begins and ends.

A familiar incident may elucidate this contrast in the operations of
nature, may render plain the manner in which a process of intellectual
improvements, the reverse of that which nature pursues, is by reason
introduced. There never perhaps existed a school-boy, who, having, when
he retired to rest, carelessly blown out his candle, and having chanced
to notice, as he lay upon his bed in the ensuing darkness, the sullen
light which had survived the extinguished flame, did not, at some time
or other, watch that light as if his mind were bound to it by a spell.
It fades and revives, gathers to a point, seems as if it would go out in
a moment, again recovers its strength, nay becomes brighter than before:
it continues to shine with an endurance, which in its apparent weakness
is a mystery; it protracts its existence so long, clinging to the power
which supports it, that the observer, who had lain down in his bed so
easy-minded, becomes sad and melancholy; his sympathies are touched; it
is to him an intimation and an image of departing human life; the
thought comes nearer to him; it is the life of a venerated parent, of a
beloved brother or sister, or of an aged domestic, who are gone to the
grave, or whose destiny it soon may be thus to linger, thus to hang upon
the last point of mortal existence, thus finally to depart and be seen
no more. This is nature teaching seriously and sweetly through the
affections, melting the heart, and, through that instinct of tenderness,
developing the understanding. In this instance the object of solicitude
is the bodily life of another. Let us accompany this same boy to that
period between youth and manhood, when a solicitude may be awakened for
the moral life of himself. Are there any powers by which, beginning with
a sense of inward decay that affects not however the natural life, he
could call to mind the same image and hang over it with an equal
interest as a visible type of his own perishing spirit? Oh! surely, if
the being of the individual be under his own care, if it be his first
care, if duty begin from the point of accountableness to our conscience