They abuse the whole art of navigation because they have stuck upon a shoal; whereas, the business is, to refit, careen, and set out a second time. The navigation is very difficult; few of us get through it at first, without some rubs and losses,-which the world are always ready enough to forgive, where they are honestly confessed, and diligently repaired.

QUICKNESS.

THERE is something extremely fascinating in quickness; and most men are desirous of appearing quick. The great rule for becoming so, is, by not attempting to appear quicker than you really are; by resolving to understand yourself and others, and to know what you mean, and what they mean, before you speak or answer. Every man must submit to be slow before he is quick; and insignificant, before he is important. The too early struggle against the pain of obscurity, corrupts no small share of understandings.

KNOWLEDGE.

Ir is not the mere cry of moralists, and the flourish of rhetoricians: but it is noble to seek truth, and it is beautiful to find it. It is the ancient feeling of the human heart, that knowledge is better than riches; and it is deeply and sacredly true! To mark the course of human passions as they have flowed on in the ages that are past; to see why nations have risen, and why they have fallen; to speak of heat, and light, and the winds; to know what man has discovered in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath; to hear the chemist unfold the marvellous properties that the Creator has

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DO WHAT YOU CAN.

locked up in a speck of earth; to be told that there are worlds so distant from our sun, that the quickness of light travelling from the world's creation, has never yet reached us; to wander in the creations of poetry, and grow warm again, with that eloquence which swayed the democracies of the old world; to go up with great reasoners to the First Cause of all, and to perceive, in the midst of all this dissolution and decay, and cruel separation, that there is one thing unchangeable, indestructible, and everlasting;—it is worth while in the days of our youth to strive hard for this great discipline; to pass sleepless nights for it, to give up to it laborious days; to spurn for it present pleasures; to endure for it afflicting poverty; to wade for it through darkness, and sorrow, and contempt, as the great spirits of the world have done in all ages and all times.

DO WHAT YOU CAN.

It is the greatest of all mistakes, to do nothing because you can only do little: but there are men who are always clamouring for immediate and stupendous effects, and think that virtue and knowledge are to be increased as a tower or a temple are to be increased, where the growth of its magnitude can be measured from day to day, and you cannot approach it without perceiving a fresh pillar, or admiring an added pinnacle.

ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.

WHEN two ideas have, by any accident, been joined together frequently in the understanding, the one idea has, ever after, the strongest tendency to bring back the other: for instance, the celebrated Descartes was very

LOVE NURTURED BY USE.

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much in love with a lady who squinted; he had so associated that passion with obliquity of vision, that he declares, to the latest hour of his life he could never see a lady with a cast in her eye, without experiencing the most lively emotions.

LOVE NURTURED BY USE.

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WHATEVER We love for its uses, we love for itself. man begins to love his horse because he carries him well out hunting: he ends with loving the horse without the slightest reference to his utility; and keeps him when he is blind and lame, with as much attention as in the vigour of his youth.

THE LOVE OF A STICK.

I REMEMBER once seeing an advertisement in the papers, with which I was much struck; and which I will take the liberty of reading:-"Lost, in the Temple Coffee House, and supposed to be taken away by mistake, an oaken stick, which has supported its master not only over the greatest part of Europe, but has been his companion in his journeys over the inhospitable deserts of Africa; whoever will restore it to the waiter, will confer a very serious obligation on the advertiser; or, if that be any object, shall receive a recompense very much above the value of the article restored." Now, here is a man, who buys a sixpenny stick, because it is useful; and, totally forgetting the trifling causes which first made his stick of any consequence, speaks of it with warmth and affection: calls it his companion; and would hardly have changed it, perhaps, for the gold stick which is carried before the king.

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FEELING.-EDUCATED GRIEF.

FEELING.

WHAT was the first command? Not "let there be colours;" not "let the herb be green, and the heavens be blue:" but, "let there be light!" and forthwith there was every variety of colour! So with us; the first mandate was not, "let man be affected with anger and gratitude," but "let man feel;" and then, matter let loose upon him, with all its malignities, and all its pleasures, roused up in him his good and his bad passions, and made him as he is,-the best and the worst of created beings.

GRIEF AND PAIN DISCRIMINATED.

The difference between grief and pain is, that we apply the expression grief to those uneasy sensations which have not the body for their immediate cause; pain, to those which have. The loss of reputation occasions grief; the loss of a limb pain.

EDUCATED GRIEF.

I AM not speaking of the highest-refined London grief,-the grief of civilisation and softness; but the grief of a savage and a child. The grief of nature in its first stage is a violent, impatient, irritating passion, very much resembling anger. The natural effect of grief and pain is, to cry out as loud as possible, and to kick and sprawl in all possible directions; and I believe, if people would do so much more than they do, they would be all the better for it. The sitting on monuments smiling, and the green and yellow melancholy, is quite a subsequent business, entirely the result of education.

EFFECT OF HABIT ON FEAR.

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PEEVISHNESS AND ENVY.

PEEVISHNESS is resentment, excited by trifles. Envy is resentment excited by superiority,—not by all superiority, but by that to which you think you are fairly entitled; for a ploughman does not envy a king, but he envies another ploughman who has a shilling a week more than he has.

EFFECT OF HABIT ON FEAR.

FEAR is the apprehension of future evil. Habit diminishes fear, when it raises up contrary associations, and increases it, when it confirms the first associations. A soldier, who has often escaped, begins to disunite the two ideas of dying and fighting; he connects also with fighting, a sense of duty, a love of glory. Habit, I should think, would increase the sensation of fear, in a person who had undergone two or three painful operations, and was about to submit to another. A man works in a gunpowder-mill every day of his life, with the utmost sang froid, which you would not be very much pleased to enter for half an hour: you have associated with the manufactory, nothing but the accidents you have heard it is exposed to; he has associated with it, the numberless days he has passed there in perfect security. For the same reason, a sailor-boy stands unconcerned upon the mast; a mason upon a ladder; and a miner descends by his single rope. Their associations are altered by experience; therefore, in estimating the degree in which human creatures are under the influence of this passion, we must always remember their previous habits.

CONTAGION OF FEAR.

IN the late attack upon Egypt, our soldiers behaved with the most distinguished courage; but a physician did