Their dark waters fought. They became crested with foam. Thence was born Aphrodite, the Goddess of beauty. Reflection is the legitimate and inevitable effect of the Socratic Elenchus. Thus, the change which Socrates introduced as to the objects and methods of philosophizing, may be characterized. It was reflection ap plied to find out truth; but especially, the truth of man. Socrates had now done his work. An accusation of impiety, and of corrupting the youth, is brought against him. He is condemned to die. The execution of the sentence is delayed by some religious ceremony. At length the Theoric Galley is seen off Sunium. It reaches the Piræus. Does he tremble? Does he supplicate for life? No! No! In his youthful days he had seen service at Potidæa, at Delium, at Amphipolis. He is now weak with age; but the truth makes him strong. Crito may weep. Xanthippe may weep. The officer may weep. But Socrates, the founder of the logical and moral schools of Athens, weeps not. He drinks the hemlock. He dies. History, thou hast done him injustice! He only shook off the ungainly exterior of the satyr. He is as well known to-day, as when standing in the agora at Athens. He can "The dark'ning universe defy To quench his immortality." Inconnue. INCONNUE, inconnue, I am thinking of thee, So sweet was its cadence and silver its tone That a spell of entrancement around me was thrown. Did it come o'er the wave from some wonderful shell, Or was it the song of a daughter of earth? I never may know whence the melody came, I never may see thee, or utter thy name, Cervantes. To deduce from abstractions their true value in the concrete and the practical, demands genius of a high order; to make and apply these deductions, argues superior endowments. Cervantes not only refined upon the idea of the burlesque, by severe contemplation of its philosophy, but he demonstrated in actual application, the power of humor to reclaim and elevate the intellect. He found his age foolishly romantic; he left it, at least wise to its own folly. The sunshine of his wit had melted away the fantastic frostwork of romance, and vivified the latent germs of a more solid literary taste. To trace the process of this transition, claims our present attention. In every period of society, the sentiments of chivalry have been more or less operative, but in Spain, from its peculiar political and social condition, these sentiments, lofty in themselves and embellished by the softer refinements of courtesy, became extravagances; thus was Spain emphatically, the land of romantic chivalry. The religious element, fostered by wars against Islamism, sanctioned, while the laws of the land legalized Knight Errantry, and an atmosphere of romance seemed to intercept the rays of reason, and tint them with unnatural hues. When the lance and target became gradually modernized into musket and cartouch-box, then the old love of the marvelous gave birth to a corresponding taste for tales of wonderment and extravagance; faith in them was strengthened by tradition, and a disposition naturally romantic; the reader gave himself up to the illusion, and by a too credulous intercourse with fantasies, lost all relish for more healthful literature. An individual or a nation thus enthralled, the sensibilities become warped, the muscles of the mind enervated, and a full development is impossible. Such was the captivity of the age. The emergency was threatening. Cervantes successfully confronted it. But his work was a delicate one, demanding acute penetration into the secret springs of hurnan action; the disease of the age needed medicine, mingled with peculiar discrimination; a moiety too much would nauseate; an ingredient too mild would destroy the effect; Cervantes theorized upon, and examined the disordered intellectual anatomy of his nation, and the result was a remedy! By pandering to the popular taste; by gratifying the whims of national caprice, Cervantes might have purchased distinction and wealth; but he chose the nobler, though seemingly less remunerative purpose, of restoring his country's mental vigor; the decision has ranked him among the truly great! The feeling of the ridiculous has a strong tendency to overturn those nobler qualities and finer susceptibilities, which have the lawful mastery over the mind. The habit of seeing things in a ludicrous light, often makes aggressive movements upon principles held sacred by the wise and good. How dangerous to society, is such a perversion of wit! The raillery of Aristophanes sadly biased the public mind, and originated the persecution of the unimpeachable Socrates. Had Cervantes thrown the reins over the neck of his humor, its wild vagaries might have trampled down the rich fruitage of thought instead of its weeds alone; but he felt himself a Reformer; his satire had in it, a purpose; it was directed against the false taste of the age. His wit was heightened by a strong sense of its necessity; lurking under an odd similitude, or an uncouth conceit, he hid severe censure. He ridiculed seriously and grandly! Moreover, mark the prudence of his plan. He angered by no direct expostulation; knowing that pride refuses to stir before arrogated authority, but that it goes readily, when seeming to have its own way, he cloaked sly satire under gravity of style, and left men to apply for themselves, the blame to their own case. The incongruity of his writings with real fact, was a parody on the habits of the times. In Don Quixote, was burlesqued the mass of romance readers of that day; the author made them ridiculous in their own eyes, without seeming to bestow upon them a passing thought. Don Quixote's faith in the reality of chivalrous romance, was but their own; his extravagant acting in accordance with his belief, made such belief ludicrous in the extreme, and contempt for his folly reacted upon their own minds, when they felt that his permanent inconsistency in action, and their own inconsistency in emotional bursts of feeling over romantic story, were but one and the same in nature, varying only in issue. But the reform to be effectual must be comprehensive; the taste of a whole nation must be modified; romance reading was the dissipation of the high, the bane of the low. Cervantes realized all this, and uttered chivalrous sentiments for the high-minded by the mouth of his principal hero; a hero, whose enthusiasm, though ill-directed, was noble; whose very dreams were the dreams of a magnanimous heart, and whose aspirations were too lofty to do battle with the realities of life. For the learned, Cervantes had indirect instruction and original criticism; his strictures upon literature were bold, but just. With the truly refined, his profound acquaintance with true principles of taste, gained him ascendency. In Don Quixote, he combined with the finer inconsis tencies, which cultivated understandings seize upon with avidity, those broad strokes of the humorous, at which the peasant laughs outright. He descended to no low ribaldry, for the true poetry of chivalry which animated his soul, shrunk back from its unholy touch, but by a universality of tact, he gained the ear, and won the heart of a large and proud nation. Thus did Cervantes leave a mark upon his age, and the work showed his strong faith in what is most valued in our nature. But the impulses of his nature could not be walled in by the limits of a century; he discerned other follies than those peculiar to his own age, and has left for every eccentricity of human nature, an appropriate rebuke; to correct the temporary errors of his countrymen, was his one idea, but with an almost prophetic judgment, he wrote for all times. Satire against local conventionalisms, rarely survives its sting; against principles, it is coëxistent with them. Cervantes ridiculed causes, not accidental effects; hence his good-natured irony, though somewhat blunted by translation into foreign tongues, is relished by all nations even to this day. Moreover, the portrait of his age, which, with vivid fidelity, he has painted, partakes of the nature of sober history. He entered home circles and depicted the every-day manners of the people, thus improving upon the gravity of history, which deals mainly in majestic facts. Thus he makes us his debtors! But have the claims of this great creditor of his own and succeeding times, been duly appreciated! The traveler in Spain, vainly seeks some stately mausoleum, on which to hang the garland of honest appreciation, for Cervantes needs no such monument! his body sleeps as it lived, in obscurity; but the record of his efforts and his success, will ever remain a part of his country's history. Every earnest scholar then, must feel with Cervantes, that talent misapplied is worse than insignifiance, but that the moral grandeur of independent integrity of motive, is the sublimest thing in nature, before which, the pomp of sepulchral magnificence and the splendor of a name, are odious as well as perishable. A. S. T. The Collegian's Topics for Writing. "I'll write it straight; The matter's in my head, and in my heart." As You Like It. Ir has been said, that in no place do men study more, but think less, than in College. This is not true; but its falsity is not half so glaring as it ought to be. It finds plausible support, partly in that foolish dissociation of study and thought, whereby the former is connected with the repetitions of the recitation room, in the relation of cause to effect, and the latter only with the stolen joys of general reading; and partly in the miserable selection so often made of topics for writing. It is plain that the character of a mind is indicated by its choice of subjects. What, then, are the subjects which engage the thoughts and pens of College students?—and what ought they to be? Of course, it would be pleasing to find the answers to these two questions identical; and on the supposition that they are so, we need not dwell long on the first. One source of information respecting it, is found in the programmes of the public exercises of the Colleges; another, in the magazines supported by the students; and another in the various literary society exercises fulfilled by the same. Examining the data derived from these sources, giving special attention to the first, we must say that the topics are not, in general, worthy of the Collegian's position. They appear to have their origin either in some Catalogue of Themes," or in the "common sentiment of mankind." Only here and there you can point to a theme, and say that it arose from the vigorous thinking of the claimant's mind. 66 It is not within our present scope to consider the general character of productions attached to such themes. Sometimes an old or foreign theme becomes vital in the hands of him who ought to let it alone; but more commonly, he who chooses his subject anywhere but in his own thoughts, will choose his ideas to match it in the same place. We will now notice the Collegian's topics in two aspects-the difficulties, and facilities, which attend their selection. In the first place they are somewhat restricted. Practical subjects are mostly to be passed over by the student's pen: for, so far as his studies are concerned, they do not make such familiar to his mind; and in the forensic disputations of the societies, these are discussed, if not with thoroughness, at least to satiety. Everything of a practical nature, from the laws of Solon to the |