SONGS.

Those persons enjoy the most happiness, if possessed of a benevolent
heart and favored by ordinary circumstances of fortune, who have
acquired by habit and education the power of deriving pleasure from
objects that lie immediately around them. But these common sources of
happiness are opened to those only who are endowed with genius, or who
have received a certain kind of intellectual training. The more
ordinary the mental and moral organization and culture of the
individual, the more far-fetched and dear-bought must be his
enjoyments. Nature has given us in full development only those
appetites which are necessary to our physical well-being. She has
left our moral appetites and capacities in the germ, to be developed
by education and circumstances. Hence those agreeable sensations that
come chiefly from the exercise of the imagination, which may be called
the pleasures of sentiment, are available only to persons of a
peculiar refinement of mind. The ignorant and rude may be dazzled and
delighted by physical beauty, and charmed by loud and stirring sounds;
but those more simple melodies and less attractive colors and forms
that appeal to the mind for their principal effect act more powerfully
upon individuals of superior culture.

In proportion as we have been trained to be agreeably affected by the
outward forms of Nature, and the sounds that proceed from the animate
and inanimate world, are we capable of being made happy without
resorting to expensive and vulgar recreations. It ought, therefore, to
be one of the chief points in the education of youth, while teaching
them the still more important offices of humanity, to cultivate and
enliven their susceptibility to the charms of natural objects. Then
would the aspects of Nature, continually changing with the progress of
the seasons and the sounds that enliven their march, satisfy, in a
great measure, that craving for agreeable sensations which leads
mankind away from humble and healthful pursuits to those of a more
artificial and exciting life. The value of such pleasures consists not
so much in their cheapness as in their favorable moral influences,
which improve the heart, while they lead the mind to observations that
pleasantly exercise and develope, without tasking its powers. The
quiet emotions, half musical and half poetical, which are awakened by
listening to the songs of birds, belong to this class of refined
enjoyments.

But the music of birds, t