the condition and the pledge of subsequent intellectual and moral progress.

Repression a Common Error of Educational Training. The attentive observation-not to say the systematic study-of man, to which the educator and teacher should ever feel himself bound, as the only security for the intelligent and successful discharge of his duties, suggests, at this stage of our subject, the fact, that a prominent fea ture of error, in the too prevalent arbitrary modes of education, has been the repression rather than the development of the natural desire of utterance in childhood.

From the very first steps of his mental and moral progress, man is not a merely selfish and receptive being. He longs to impart his feelings, and to communicate his observations: he wishes to give, as well as to receive: he feels impelled to utter himself that he may impart and confer, not less than receive. His impulse, as a sympathetic one, is unselfish, generous, noble. When the child exclaims to his playmate on the beauty of the flower which they see, he does not merely call for sympathy in the delight which he feels: he would, by his instinctive expression of pleasure, suggest and impart that delight.

Utterance, under the benign guardianship of Nature, as its Author's interpreter, is thus, essentially and substantially, a moral process, not less than a merely sympathetic and intellectual one. Nor, in education, should it ever be forgotten that, by the Creator's ordination, every utterance of a feeling or an emotion, gives it additional strength. and life; and that, obeying the divinely instituted law of speech and communication, we are aiding in the process of building up, day by day, and hour by hour, the fabric of human character.

Arbitrary education, however, is, in no feature of its meddling mismanagement more conspicuous than in the restriction, the reserve, and the silence, which it is ever so prone to impose, and on which it is so apt to plume itself, with reference even to the very first stages of its repellent sway.

The five years' probationary and preparatory silence which Pythagoras is said to have exacted of his disciples, might be an excellent discipline for mature minds, as an introduction to the "metaphysic bog profound," into which he meant thereafter to plunge them. But one of the first and most urgent wants of childhood is utterance. The innocent little human being is ever thus holding out his petty link in the golden chain which binds heart to heart, mind to mind, and man to God: he is ever ready to join his link to that of his neighbor. But the mechanical educationist, with his “look at your book, and not at me!" frowns the infant volunteer back to his seat,

to his individuality, and his isolation; and the chain by which the little petitioner for sympathy and knowledge, might have been lifted with the conjoined force of the mental world, is of no avail to him: his link of connection with it is yet detached. His turn has not yet come, in the great game of opportunity; and he must bide his time as best he may.

Appropriate Training.-Under the unerring and genial guidance of the mother, the child is not perpetually immured within doors, or confined to one spot, or fixed in one posture: he is allowed, occasionally, at least, to behold the outward world, to range the fields, to walk on the road, to observe the objects around him, to feel their attractive force, to admire their beauty, to wonder and to inquire about what is new to him, to utter his exclamations of pleasure, to examine, and to name whatever strikes his attention. He thus enjoys his own nature in the free exercise of his faculties; he is consciously progressive in intelligence and in speech, as in feeling, and, so far, is effectually and successfully preparing to become, in due season, eloquently expressive.

Disadvantages of City Education.-The worst, perhaps, of all the many evils attending the supposed necessity of congregating in cities, and adopting artificial modes of life, is one but little thought of. The parent who relinquishes his rural home in the open village street or in the field, flatters himself, perhaps, that he is securing better educational advantages for his children, when he takes up his abode in one of the confined dwellings of the close-crowded city. He may find, by the exchange, a teacher more expert in turning the machinery of instruction, and a more ample supply of the learning to be had from books. But the nobler, the truly liberal part of his childrens' education, he has foregone forever. The free scope, the pure, bracing air, the rich variety of nature,-the healthful influence of these on the growing frame and the expanding mind, on the susceptible heart, on the plastic imagination, on the whole soul and character; these are sacrificed, and with them, the best capabilities of culture.

Educational Benefits of Rural Life.-In no respect are the losses just mentioned greater than in regard to the part of education which we are now contemplating. To the child reared in the freedom and the beauty of nature, everything around him becomes a language, expressing the happiness which he unconsciously enjoys. His vocabulary is furnished in the forms, the colors, the life, the sounds and motion, amid which he finds himself. The half-conscious awe which he feels, under the deep shade and the sweeping boughs of the great elm, through which he looks up, with a pleasing dread and wonder

to the over-arching sky, the beautiful wild-flower which waves and nods to him as he passes, the brook which runs bubbling and gurgling through the meadow, the majesty of the flowing river, the roaring of the winter wind through the bare trees, the whirling of the snow-flakes, the glittering garment of the ice-storm, the opening of the spring buds, the fluttering of the summer leaves, and the sailing of the falling leaf in autumn, the enlivening voices of the domestic animals, the entrancing music of the birds;-these, and a thousand other unpaid teachers, have all been training him in a language true, copious, perfect, and inspiring, compared to which, book-learning is but as the dry husk to the rich nutritious grain.

Genial Culture.-To favor and cherish, not to check, utteranceto elicit, not to repress expression,-to multiply, and deepen, and expand, and fill, not to dry up, the sources and reservoirs of language;— these are the true offices of education. The cultivation of the young mind, taking a suggestive hint from the cultivation of the young tree, should allow a liberal scope of nutrition, of growth and expansion, before calling in the aid of the pruning knife. A large part of early education should consist in conversation, in which the pupil should freely partake, as the natural means of acquiring accuracy and expertness, as well as freedom, in expression. The tendency to write and to draw, should have full scope and ample encouragement. Care should be taken to render interesting and attractive every form of exercise by which the student may ultimately attain to the free, forcible, and correct expression of thought. To the various modes of securing such fruits of culture, in detail, we shall have occasion to advert in the sequel.

IV. RESULT OF THE ACTION OF THE EXPRESSIVE FACULTIES:COMMUNICATION.

The Power of Communication.-In the previous stages of our present inquiries, we have been occupied with the classification of the powers of expression, their springs of action, and the habitual tendency and direction of their current, under the guidance of unassisted nature and of education. The next step in the progress of investigation preliminary and introductory to the actual work of express culture, is the consideration of the Results at which, whether by the law of natural development or that of educational cultivation, the human being arrives, in consequence of the exercise of his powers of expression.

The immediate result of utterance is Communication,—the impartation and interchange of sympathy or sentiment, by which man inspires his fellow man with the same feeling, affection, emotion, passion,

thought, or sentiment, which actuates himself; and which, as the circle of kindred minds is enlarged by the aggregation of numbers, extends his personal mood or mental condition throughout the sphere of the community of which he is a member.

Intellectual and Moral Effects of Communication. The views, the will, and the power of an individual, acquire, through communication, an ascendency, it may be, over a nation, or even over the whole civilized race, for successive ages; while, on the other hand, the intellectual acquisitions, the moral and spiritual attainments, the sympathies and the accumulated resources of nations and of ages, may be brought to the aid of the individual, through the magic power of language.

For good or for evil, man's power of communication with his fellows, gives to the aggregated multitudes of a whole people, or even of the race, the unity of purpose, the singleness of aim, the directness, the personal efficiency, the ease and the certainty of action of a single agent; while it equally arms the individual with the intellectual, the physical, and the moral force of millions. The sage, the orator, the poet, the artist, the statesman, the warrior, thus become the recognized representatives of a people or of mankind, to whom communities and nations bow in submission or in homage, and to whose ascendant genius they render the tribute of heart and hand, of treasure, or of life. Thus, too, the youth, in his studious endeavors to advance his intellectual and moral condition, has the aid arising from the experience, the counsels, the guidance, and the sympathies of the intelligent and the virtuous of every age and nation which possesses an accessible record of its progress; and the student whose days have been spent in strictest seclusion and unremitting investigation, enjoys the assurance that the fruits of his solitary research and strenuous application shall be gathered not by himself alone, but by whatever enlightened and sympathizing minds, throughout the world, and in all subsequent time, shall come within his sphere of communication by living voice or written word.

Value of Communication.-Communication, as the boon of language, is not to be measured by its immediate results merely, as a telegraphic convenience for the impartation of feeling or the conveyance of thought,-great as its uses, in this relation, are to the whole race. Language is the vehicle of all knowledge. Like the noble ship, costly and valuable in itself, but yet more valuable in the treasure with which it is fraught, it comes laden with the accumulations of countless minds and boundless wealth. To measure its full value, we should have to compute the number and the worth of every

acquisition which the mind has garnered up in the records of every department of science and literature, and thus rendered capable of conveyance from man to man, and from generation to generation, throughout the world.

V.

EDUCATIONAL PROCESSES FOR THE CULTIVATION OF THE Ex-
PRESSIVE FACULTIES.

These may be classed under the following heads: The Attentive Observation and the Love of Nature; the Study and the Practice of Art; the Study of Language; the Practice of Exercises in Oral and Written Expression.

OMISSIONS AND DEFECTS IN MODES OF CULTURE.-Language. -The plan of education generally adopted for the exercise and discipline of the expressive faculties, indicates little philosophical design, logical consistency, generous spirit, or liberal scope, in the course which it prescribes. It is founded on views too narrow and exclusive; and its execution has been too mechanical. The mother's and the teacher's eye has been fastened too exclusively on the facts of language alone, as so many detached points to be mastered in detail. Hence the injury sometimes done to the organs of speech, by premature attempts to conquer some of the difficulties of articulation, in the mother's zeal for the precocious development of the faculties of her child; and hence, also, the mechanical and arbitrary processes of alphabètic training, in its customary forms. The eager desire for immediate definite results, has caused the teacher, too generally, to overlook the great facts that language is but one of the forms in which the expressive faculties are exerted, or in which expressive power is to be developed, and that the successful cultivation of language is inseparable from due exercise in all the kindred forms of expression to which the mind naturally tends.

The general plan of education is limited to instruction and practice in the oral and written forms of language, in the school routine of reading and grammar, and what is termed composition. The forms of exercise and the methods of training, also, in these departments of education, have too generally been literal and mechanical; and the poverty and imperfection of the results have betrayed the defects of the plan which prescribed them.

Methods too exclusively Passive and Receptive.-The great importance of a full and generous development of the whole mental constitution, as indispensable to the right action of any of its elements, having been overlooked in the plan of education, due allowance has too seldom been made, in the training of the mind, for the adequate exercise and discipline of the active nature and of the expressive