at the gate!

Nay, start not, parental reader--nor, in the terror of anticipation,
send, without loss of a single day, for your son at a distant academy,
mayhap pursuing even such another career. Trust thou to the genial,
gracious, and benign _vis medicatrix naturae_. What though a few clouds
bedim and deform "the innocent brightness of the new-born day?" Lo! how
splendid the meridian ether! What though the frost seem to blight the
beauty of the budding and blowing rose? Look how she revives beneath
dew, rain, and sunshine, till your eyes can even scarce endure the
lustre! What though the waters of the sullen fen seem to pollute the
snow of the swan? They fall off from her expanded wings, and, pure as a
spirit, she soars away, and descends into her own silver lake, stainless
as the water-lilies floating round her breast. And shall the immortal
soul suffer lasting contamination from the transient chances of its
nascent state--in this, less favoured than material and immaterial
things that perish? No--it is undergoing endless transmigrations,--every
hour a being different, yet the same--dark stains blotted out--rueful
inscriptions effaced--many an erasure of impressions once thought
permanent, but soon altogether forgotten--and vindicating, in the midst
of the earthly corruption in which it is immersed, its own celestial
origin, character, and end, often flickering, or seemingly blown out,
like a taper in the wind, but all at once self-reillumined, and shining
in inextinguishable and self-fed radiance--like a star in heaven.

Therefore, bad as boys too often are--and a disgrace to the mother who
bore them--the cradle in which they were rocked--the nurse by whom they
were suckled--the schoolmaster by whom they were flogged--and the
hangman by whom it was prophesied they were to be executed--wait
patiently for a few years, and you will see them all transfigured--one
into a preacher of such winning eloquence, that he almost persuades all
men to be Christians--another into a parliamentary orator, who commands
the applause of listening senates, and

"Reads his history in a nation's eyes"

--one into a painter, before whose thunderous heavens the storms of
Poussin "pale their ineffectual fires"--another into a poet composing
and playing, side by side, on his own peculiar harp, in a concert of
vocal and instrumental music, with Byron, Scott, and Wordsworth--one
into a great soldier, who, when Wellington is no more, shall