awakened his tastes, his moral impulses, his love of freedom and his admiration of actions marked by ennobling virtues, that will not acknowledge and rejoice that he imbibed them, in youth, at the shrine of classical antiquity-that shrine upon which genius, in nearly every form, has cast its abundant offering. Weak and vain were the effort to depreciate or deny the contributions, so varied and so rich, which succeeding ages have added to the stores of genius, of knowledge and of virtue; yet three thousand years still leave the divine tale of Troy, in the general judgment of cultivated intelligence, and in the spontaneous sentiment of those most keenly alive to poetic beauty, without a rival in the varied and matchless excellences of the poet's art. When you have studied with delight the breathing forms of dignity or grace, which the chisel of Michael Angelo or Canova has created from the cold and senseless marble, you are content, in proof of your strongest admiration, to compare them, in generous rivalry, with fragments rescued from the ruins of the Acropolis, or dug from beneath the buried palaces of Rome. In vain, through the long ages that have glided by since sage philosophy descended to the low roofed house of Socrates, do we seek for lessons of thoughtful virtue more pure, ennobling or cheering than those he taught, among all that uninspired intelligence has, with brightest aims, imparted to mankind; 1; and even now, as in the days of Tully, the truths most needed in the intercourse of men can find a stronger

sanction from his name. When in annals more or less remote, and even in these our own eventful times, we behold the struggle to wrest from the power of hoary despotism the inherent rights of men, and with them to gain the just and sole security for their permanent welfare, can we forget the glorious efforts for the same great ends which enchained our earliest sympathies, confirmed our judgments, and fixed our own future purposes, as we traced them, with eager hopes, through the varied history of those republics which first proclaimed them and contended for them, as the basis of political institutions. And throughout life, in pondering on the characters of men, and recalling those deeds which have best exhibited their patriotism, their courage, or their disinterestedness-which have best illustrated the virtues most frequently required by social life, or best serve as beacons to point out the vices and follies from which we should protect it-do not those names rise spontaneously to our memory, which have been preserved in the records of Grecian and Roman story? With them we compare the names and actions of those most revered in our own history; and we desire no better proof of their title to the favoring judgment of their country, than that they may justly rank with them. Do I err in believing that these are influences which will be acknowledged, without dissent, by all who recur to those studies of youth which were devoted to the literature of Greece and Rome? Do I err in saying that they are influences

on subsequent life, among those to be most anxiously. coveted and secured?

Will you withdraw from the inquiries of the student the wide expanse of scientific investigation, and force him to confine them within some limited sphere which you deem more appropriate to his future pursuits? I will not say to you, in reply, that it is scarcely possible but that, in the accidents of life, every branch of science may prove to be of practical utility; for it is not this circumstance that alone, or even mainly, imparts to such studies their principal value. But I do say to you, that he who has to pass through life, where, at every step, the truths of physical nature are forced upon his notice, without having his mind instructed upon their main outlines, principles and relations-upon the leading facts which elucidate and the great laws which regulate them-has indeed made himself to wander, voluntarily blindfold, along a path which he might have found "so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospects and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming." He rudely casts from himself pleasures that Nature gladly offers him; he closes up springing fountains of pure and grateful emotions; he blunts the keenness of intellect and narrows the scope of useful illustration; and while he wraps himself in the vain belief that energy has been strengthened and success attained, by singleness of purpose and of aim,

he has but deprived himself of resources that would have augmented both.

Early and accurately to have learned the great truths which pervade the wide circle of the sciences, is to start upon the race of life lightened of a thousand errors and illusions that could hardly fail to check its progress, and beckoned onward by prospects, on every side, that cheer and accelerate it. The observation of external nature is, to some degree, necessarily forced upon us all. He cannot shut it out who chooses to devote himself to the labors of the forum, the restless pursuits of commerce, the patient toils of agriculture, or the intricacies of mechanic art; nor he who bears his ministering aid to alleviate suffering or to ward off death; nor he who, in discharge of a yet holier trust, seeks to justify the ways of God to men. The courses of the stars are not hidden from him, nor the grateful influences of the heavens in their appointed seasons; and shall he not, as he witnesses them, acquaint himself with those laws by which science has removed from them every vestige of superstition and of fear, and made them to lay open bright celestial paths, by which we may advance farther and farther into regions that display the wonders of an infinite creation? Organic life is ever before him, in all its countless forms, from his own wonderful structure, through successive varieties of intelligent being, down to the plants that ofttimes seem almost to unite with it. Even the rude masses

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of unorganized matter offer their sermon, not alone to the pensive enthusiast who pores upon them, exempt from public haunt, but to every one to whose involuntary notice, the fragments of rocks, scattered across his path, disclose the secrets of creation and the evidences of endless forms of animated existence. And is it possible for him who finds these heavens above and far beyond him, and around him this wonderful world alike breathing and inanimate-all pressing themselves upon his notice; becoming, whatever his occupations may be, the objects of his observation; of necessity engaging his reflections and even affecting the actions of his life—is it possible, that he should not desire and seek to imbue his mind with the laws and the truths in regard to them which science has collected and arranged? Will the chosen end of his efforts be better reached by indulging a sullen ignorance in regard to them? Or will he not rather confess that the rills of knowledge, gathered from all her countless springs, serve but to fertilize, for every purpose, the intellect over which they flow?

And if this be so in regard to those studies which fill the mind, at the outset of life, with the treasures of classical learning and varied instruction in diversified science; how much more has the whole of its subsequent course given us occasion gratefully to recur to those early teachings, by which we were made to understand and love the political institutions of our country, as best fitted to promote the social happiness