On this page

• Text (1)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Untitled Article

    is trying hard to cover tip his ashes as though there had been no such man living . "' ., [ TE ! his volume of Essays was not published till after IHe author ' s death , and only , as Taylor and Hessey informed us spj $ e years ago , " as a little memorial of the main . " They are fiilfof energetic truth and beauty , original in their views , delightful in their humour , with a constant under-current of benevolence in their tendency . Most of the copies were sold

    for waste paper . The first essay contained in this volume is " On the spirit of youth in the young and the old . " It breathes the spirit of both periods throughout , and illustrates the subject even by the pathetic playfulness of its Btyle .

    ** The child is rich in hope , and longs to be a man ; the man has his treasures in memory , and wishes that he had always been a child . We are all pleased to look back upon ourselves as school-boys , and recall , with a mournful tenderness , those thoughtless happy days when we had masters to instruct us that we were born to suffer and to die , but when

    the feeling was , that we had life within us , whose principle was enjoyment , and whose duration without end . Whether our school-days are the happiest of our lives is a contested question ; but there can be no dbubt , I think , as to those of them passed out of school . I have no great favour , I confess , for masters , and cannot conscientiously

    defend the agreeableness of lessons , or the pleasing propriety of being flogged for not attending to them ; but the play-ground ! and the holidays !—no , there is nothing like them afterwards . In estimating the happiness of a school-boy , people are apt to think more of the school than of the boy . He is not happy in consequence of being at school , but

    in spite of it . " How beautiful is that law of playfulness , which governs the youth of all created animals ! How glorious that short-lived era of the blood , whan school-boys , and puppies , and kittens , caper and dance , by a sort of instinct , or necessity ! This irresistible gaiety is not the result of superior health and strength : it is the exulting spirit of mere life in the newly born—an elementary joyousness , which requires no aid from without , which is not excited in them , but is a part of them . The child , in

    proof of its being , might say , in the spirit of the philosopher—I rejoice , therefore , I am . We , whom years and knowledge have invested with , the prerogative of being serious , smile at the ecstacies of youthful levity , / wfth a sympathy moderated by contempt . Poor , foolish creature , how , happy it allows itself to be I rleasant enough , we exclaim ; but , ah I if it knew what was to comet We shake our prophetic heads when we see the lambs frisking about us , arid think of mutton .

    " This triumphant sense of life hai different degrees of duration , according to varieties in moral and constitutional temperament ; it may give Way , before its natural period , to the shocks of accident ; sometimes it is prolonged almost to that term which we call our years of discretion ; and 1 ^^ out in brief traiwpptts through the gloom widthe /^ fcq $ pi *^^ reason a ^ m ^ ancb ^ away , in a spring morning , perhaps , a gentleman of sober habits feels himself , on

    Untitled Article

    jj § 4 JtetrtityttfwdGltinc&s .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 1, 1837, page 324, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1832/page/6/