thership to common
fathers, and offers choicest counsel to those who would assume the
office of family-teacher honestly and in the fear of God. And it seems
to us that of these subtle influences of home-culture, whose gospel
Richter here declares, our American parents have been too neglectful.
The world knows that we are proud, and justly so, of our public
educational apparatus. But that our legislation in this direction
produces nothing but good, no observing man can admit. This elaborate
reading-and-writing machine of which the State turns the handle, while
it induces a certain average sharpness in the children, leaves rusting
some of the noblest privileges as well as the highest duties of the
parent. Yet citizens will cry that they feel their responsibilities for
educating, and, to their better fulfilment, work daily for dollars. This
is well; but let us not throw our dollars in a parabolic curve over the
house, on the chance of their making a happy descent in some distant
school-room. The bringing-up of children is something very different
from pickling cucumbers or salting fish,--it cannot be done by contract
and in the gross. But, ah, there is no time for anything else! Then
reduce your way of living to anything above the food-and-shelter point,
and so make time. Richter was always poor, always a man of great labor
and great performance, and here is what he says:--"I deny myself my
evening meal in my eagerness to work; but the interruptions by my
children I cannot deny myself."

"Levana" is peculiarly adapted to cause those who have to do with
children to feel all the emancipating and renovating power of their
trust. It cannot leave us satisfied with any conventional arrangement
which brings to plausible maturity a limited per cent. There are,
indeed, minds strong enough to pass through the bitter years of
unlearning what has been taught amiss, and then, bating no jot of heart
or courage, to begin education for themselves in middle life. But often
it is far otherwise. Too often, owing to the indolence or immaturity of
those who assume the responsibility of parents, the child is cast into a
terrible moral perplexity, which is at last moral corruption. Our duties
toward different children are as eclectic and irregular as Nature
herself. There is a need to study and respect the individual character,
which claims from parents the daily use of their mental powers,--and
this without a compelling external stimulus. Now i