moss, where the fairies have danced, and the flowers
that have sprung up under their footsteps, will leave a trace of
beauty, of mystery, and strange happiness wherever its later life may
be cast. The senses mingle powerfully in all the influences of
childhood. It is not merely the loving of parents, the purity and
truthfulness of the family relations, that make home so precious a
recollection; there are visions of winter evenings, with the curtains
drawn, the fire blazing, and gay voices or wonderful picture-books;
there are summer rambles in the cool evening, when the delicious
night-breeze fanned the cheek, and we gazed into the heavens to search
out the bright stars. It is, then, most important in educating
children to guard the senses from evil influences, to furnish them
with pure and beautiful objects. Each separate sense should preserve
its acuteness of faculty: the eye should not be injured by resting on
a vulgar confusion of colours, or clumsy, ill-proportioned forms; the
ear should not be falsified by discordant sounds, and harsh, unloving
voices; the nose should not be a receptacle for impure odours: each
sense should be preserved in its purity, and the objects supplied to
them should be filled with moral suggestion and true sentiment; the
house, the dress, the food, may preach to the child through its
senses, and aid its growth in quite another way from the protection
afforded, or the good blood which feeds its organs.--_Blackwell's Laws
of Life._

AN AMERICAN NOTION.

In this book-making age, every man rushes to the press with his small
morsel of imbecility, his little piece of favourite nonsense, and is
not easy till he sees his impertinence stitched in blue covers. Some
one possesses the vivacity of a harlequin--he is fuddled with animal
spirits, giddy with constitutional joy; in such a state, he must write
or burst: a discharge of ink is an evacuation absolutely necessary to
avoid fatal and plethoric congestion. A musty and limited pedant
yellows himself a little among rolls and records, plunders a few
libraries, and, lo! we have an entire new work by the learned Mr
Dunce, and that after an incubation of only one month. He is, perhaps,
a braggadocio of minuteness, a swaggering chronologer, a man bristling
up with small facts, prurient with dates, wantoning in obsolete
evidence. No matter; there are plenty of newspapers who are constantly
lavishing their praises upon small men and bad books. A