and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge, and good-will.

8. Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. And here we must recite the iron law which Nature thunders in these northern climates. First, she requires that each man should feed himself. If, happily, his fathers have left him no inheritance, he must go to work, and by making his wants less, or his gains more, he must draw himself out of that state of pain and insult in which she forces the beggar to lie. She gives him no rest until this is done. She starves, taunts, and torments him, takes away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends, and daylight, until he has fought his way to his own loaf. Then, less peremptorily, but still with sting enough, she urges him to the acquisition of such things as belong to him. Every warehouse and shop-window, every fruit-tree, every thought of every hour, opens a new want to him, which it concerns his power and dignity to gratify.

Emerson's Essays.

12. THE ASTRONOMER'S VISION.

[This extract, translated and paraphrased by Professor Mitchell, is characterized by solemnity and sublimity, awe and wonder. It should be read with subdued force, median stress, orotund quality, low pitch.]

1. Gód called up from dreams a man into the vestibule of heaven, saying, "Come thou hither and see the glory of my house." And to the servants that stood around his throne he said, "Take him, and undress him from his robes of flèsh: cleanse his vision, and put a new breath into his nòstrils: only touch not with any change his human heart-the heart that wèeps and trèmbles."

2. It was dòne: and, with a mighty ángel for his

guide, the man stood ready for his infinite voyage; and from the terraces of heaven, without sound or farewell, at once they wheeled away into endless space. Sometimes with the solemn flight of angel wing they fled through infinite realms of dúrkness, through wildernesses of death, that divided the worlds of life; sometimes they swept over frontiers that were quickening under prophetic mótions from God.

3. Then from a distance that is counted only in heaven, light dawned for a time through a sleepy film; by unutterable páce, the light swept to them, they, by unutterable páce, to the light. In a moment, the rushing of planets was upon them: in a móment, the blázing of suns was around them.

4. Then came etérnities of twilight, that revealed, but were not revealed. On the right hand and on the left toward mighty constellátions, that by self-repetitions and answers from afar, that by counter-positions, built up triúmphal gútes, whose árchitraves, whose árchways— horizontal, upright-résted, rose at altitude, by spans that seemed ghóstly from infìnitude. Without méasure were the architraves, past númber were the archways, beyond memory the gates.

5. Within were stairs that scaled the eternities below; above was belòw-belów was abòve, to the man stripped of gravitating bòdy: depth was swallowed up in height insurmountable, height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Súddenly, as thus they rode from infinite to infinite, súddenly, as thus they tilted over, abysmal worlds, a mighty cry aròse-that systems more mystérious, that worlds more billowy,—other heights and other dépths, were cóming, were néaring, were at hand.

6. Then the man sighed, and stooped, shuddered, and wèpt. His overladen héart uttered itself in téars, and he said: "Angel', I will go no farther. For the spirit of man acheth with this infinity. Insufferable is the

glory of God. Let me lie down in the gráve and hide me from the prosecution of the infinite; for énd, I see, there is none."

7. And from all the listening stárs that shone around issued a choral voice: "The man speaks truly: énd there is nóne, that ever yet we heard of." End' is there nóne?" the angel solemnly demanded. Is there indeed no end?-and is this the sorrow that kills you?" But no voice answered, that he might answer himself. Then the angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying, "End' is there none to the universe of God. Ló! álso, there is no beginning."

13. EDUCATION.

1. Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game at chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight?

2. Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the

universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.

3. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated-without haste, but without remorse.

4. Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.

5. It is important to remember that, in strictness, there is no such thing as an uneducated man. Take an extreme case. Suppose that an adult man, in the full vigor of his faculties, could be suddenly placed in the world, as Adam is said to have been, and then left to do as he best might. How long would he be left uneducated? Not five minutes. Nature would begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the properties of objects. Pain and pleasure would be at his elbow telling him to do this and avoid that; and by slow degrees the man would receive an education, which, if narrow, would be thorough, real, and adequate to his circumstances, though there would be no extras and very few accomplishments.

6. Those who take honors in Nature's university, who learn the laws which govern men and things and obey them, are the really great and successful men in this world. Those who won't learn at all are plucked; and then you can't come up again. Nature's pluck means extermination.

7. Thus the question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as willful disobedience-incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your ears are boxed.

HUXLEY.

14. MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS.

1. For all the higher arts of construction, some acquaintance with mathematics is indispensable. The village carpenter, who, lacking rational instruction, lays out his work by empirical rules learnt in his apprenticeship, equally with the builder of a Britannia Bridge, makes hourly reference to the laws of quantitative relations. The surveyor on whose survey the land is purchased, the architect in designing a mansion to be built on it, the builder in preparing his estimates, his foreman in laying out the foundations, the masons in cutting the stones, and the various artisans who put up the fittings, are all guided by geometrical truths. Railway-making is regulated from beginning to end by mathematics alike in the preparation of plans and sections, in staking out the line, in the mensuration of cuttings and embankments, in the designing, estimating,