tor," said Scott, "when Molly puts the kettle on, you might as well say, don't boil!"

This living energy of mind, it is hard to kindle. How many go down to the grave without having known, during a long life, what thought is! How many abide in miserable superstitions, victims of every quack in religion, politics and literature, their minds mere collections of chips and hearsays, feeling their degradation, yet preferring it to the labor of mental effort! This slavery of the soul, these chains clanking upon every utterance of opinion, can only be broken by the strength within the man. It is a comparatively easy task to induce men to sacrifice comfort and wealth, to be fanatics, and very brave fanatics, for any cruel nonsense which has obtained in the world, but to induce them to think, -oh! that is requiring too much for the energies of mortal man! And yet, forsooth, the world is becoming too intellectual! We educate the intellect too much! "My friends," said Dr. Johnson, "clear your minds of cant!"

Indeed, education can hardly be too intellectual, unless by intellectual you mean parrot knowledge, and other modes of mind-slaughter. No education deserves the name, unless it develops thought, — unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth. There, all education, intellectual, moral, religious, begins; for morality,

religion, intelligence, have all one foundation in vital thought; that is, in thought which conceives all objects with which it deals, whether temporal or eternal, visible or invisible, as living realities, not as barren propositions. Here is the vital principle of all growth in learning, in virtue, in intelligence, in holiness. If this fail, there is no hope:

"The pillared firmament is rottenness,

And earth's base built on stubble."

the

Thus force of being, to labor, to create, to pluck out the heart of nature's mystery,—this is the law of genius. It would be impossible here to follow this live and lifegiving thought of man in its invasion of the possible and the unknown. Its result is human knowledge, sciences of mind and matter, poetry and the plastic arts, with their myriad untraceable influences upon society and individual character. Genius, mental power, wherever you look, you see the radiant footprints of its victorious progress. It has surrounded your homes with comfort; it has given you the command of the blind forces of matter; it has exalted and consecrated your affections; it has brought God's immeasurable universe nearer to your hearts and imaginations; it has made flowers of paradise spring up even in poor men's gardens. And, above all, it is never stationary; its course being ever onward to new triumphs, its repose but har.nonious ac

tivity, its acquisitions but stimulants to discoveries. Answering to nothing but the soul's illimitable energies, it is always the preacher of hope, and brave endeavor, and unwearied, elastic effort. It is hard to rouse in their might these energies of thought; but when once roused, when felt tingling along every nerve of sensation, the whole inward being thrilling with their enkindling inspiration,

"And all the God comes rushing on the soul,"

there seem to be no limits to their capacity, and obstacles shrivel into ashes in their fiery path. This deep feeling of power and joy, this ecstasy of the living soul, this untamed and untamable energy of Genius, you cannot check its victorious career as it leaps exultingly from discovery to discovery, new truths ever beckoning imploringly in the dim distance, a universe ever opening and expanding before it, and above all a Voice still crying, On! on!-On! though the clay fall from the soul's struggling powers!-On! though the spirit burn through its garment of flesh, as the sun through mist!— On! on!

"Along the line of limitless desires."

Philos. - Puchols

INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE.*

A PROMINENT characteristic of the present day, and in many respects an admirable one, is the universal attention given to the subject of bodily health; but, like many other movements founded on half-truths, it has been pushed by fanaticism into ludicrous perversions. Physiology has been systematized into a kind of popular gospel, in whose doctrines the soul seems of little importance in comparison with the gastric juice. Physic having become a fashion, a valetudinary air is now the sign of your true coxcomb; and every idle person has his pet complaint, which he nurses in some genteel infirmary. There is an universal cant about health; every city and hamlet is beleaguered by the hosts of Hippocrates, the floods of Hydropathy, and the animalculæ of Homeopathy; and no person can venture into the street without being assaulted by some Hygeian highwayman, who

* Delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College July 25, 1849.

presents a phial to his head, and demands his patience or his purse. Now, the practical consequence of this deification of the body and worship of dietetics, is to bring men under the dominion of a sickly selfishness and a craven cowardice, while pretending to teach them the physical laws of their being. Man obeys the highest law of his being when he takes his life in his hand, and boldly ventures it for something he values more than self. Life cast away for truth or duty, even for fame or knowledge, is better than life saved for the sake of living. But your true disciple of physiological religion, with his morbid consciousness of that collection of veins, bones, muscles and appetites, which he calls himself, would consider it a monstrous violation of the physical laws of his being to obey a benevolent impulse which endangered a blood-vessel, or to purchase the discovery of a new truth at the expense of deranged digestion: and he would. survey with lazy wonder the strange ignorance of Howard, penetrating into pestilential prisons; of Washington, exposing his person to a storm of bullets; of Ridley, serenely yielding his frame to that baptism of fire which enrolled him forever in the glorious army of martyrs. Such acts as these were doubtless violations of physical laws, and prove that heroes are not framed on accurate physiological principles.

Indeed, health and disease, in their highest meaning,