powers of the human being. The general prescription of the processes of instruction, has evidently been directed to the receptive action of the understanding and the impleting of the memory. The mind of the pupil has been too uniformly kept in a comparatively passive condition. He has not been permitted and invited to use sufficiently even those materials of expression which he has, from the earliest steps of his progress, in the routine of education, been so laboriously employed in accumulating. Expression, neglected in early training, becomes difficult in later stages; and conscious failure incurred in attempting it, renders it distasteful. Effort, under such circumstances, is reluctantly made, frequently intermitted, and ere long discontinued.

Neglect of our own Language.-No remark is more common or more true, than that even our highest and best courses of culture do not result in furnishing accomplished men, as regards the actual use, in speech or writing, of our own language. Ample time, comparatively, is usually allowed for the study of the ancient languages, and even for that of some of the modern; but little is expressly assigned for the thorough acquisition of our own, which, to ensure to the student a perfect command of it, should be the groundwork of daily exercises, thoughtfully planned and carefully executed, from the first steps in education onward to the last day of professional preparation for the business of life.

Faults of Unconscious Teaching.--Some of the many causes of imperfect teaching, in the department of language, may be found in the fact, that the true nature and actual character of early training are not recognized by those whose office it is to superintend the first steps of childhood in the path of development. The mother and the primary teacher too often overlook the vast influence of example, which, to the imitative nature of childhood, always becomes a model. Hence the imperfect articulation, incorrect pronunciation, mechanical monotony, and lifeless tone, which are so generally prevalent in school reading. These faults are, too often, faithful copies of the style which the ear of the young learner has unconsciously caught from his mother, his teacher, or his class-mates, and which habit rivets on his voice, for life.

Error in Alphabetic Instruction.-The mechanical manner in which the child's first lessons in reading are sometimes conducted, is another cause of failure, in the department of instruction to which we now refer. In many schools, the young pupil never has his attention called, definitely or consciously, to the fact that the letters of the alphabet are phonetic characters, the whole value of which con

sists in the sounds which they represent in many, he may pass through the whole course of instruction without being once called to practice the constituent elementary sounds of his own language: in very many, there is no attempt made to exercise and develop, modify, or cultivate, in any form, the voice itself. Hence the prevalence of the errors which have been already mentioned as fruits of unconscious imitation, and which careful, early cultivation can alone pre

vent.

Neglect of the Meaning of Words.-An obvious defect in prevalent modes of education, as regards adequate preparation for the free and correct use of our native language, is the yet too common neglect of early and progressive etymological training in the analysis of words, and the tracing of the significant value of their component syllables, so as to ascertain and fix in the mind their exact meaning and full power, and to follow their transitions from a primary to a secondary sense, or from one which is figurative and imaginative to one which is purely intellectual or merely practical. It is such intimate knowledge, and such only, the fruit of daily exercise and careful training, that can give, at length, to the mature scholar, or the professional speaker, that mastery of words, which now so often, when almost too late, he feels that he needs for the full and perfect expression of his thoughts.

Defective Forms of Reading Exercises.—A common and marked failure of education, as regards the course of instruction in reading, is partly attributable to the cause last mentioned, the unintelligent enunciation of words, but largely, also, to the mechanical perusal and unmeaning pronunciation of sentences, as merely so many successions of audible sounds. Such exercises deaden rather than enliven the powers of expression, as they blunt rather than sharpen the understanding, for the intelligent conception of meaning. Yet, in not a few schools is it the fact, that even quite young pupils are never asked, in performing a reading exercise, to point out, previous to the pronouncing of a sentence, those words in it which are most significant or expressive, and accordingly require that special force or turn of utterance, which alone can render them emphatic, so as to convey their full sense, or bring out the whole sentiment which the sentence was framed to express. A similar neglect is too prevalent as regards the effect of proper pauses in reading, which should always suggest to the ear an intelligent analysis of a sentence into its constituent portions of sense, not, as is very frequently the case, a mechanical analysis, servilely following the grammatical punctuation with measured uniformity of utterance, whatever be the depth of thought, or the force of feeling,

implied in the language of the composition. As the syntactical punctuation, although it may often coincide with the expressive and significant rhetorical pausing, does not necessarily do so, but, on the contrary, is sometimes directly at variance with it, the effect of uniformly following the points, must, in such cases, be a positive hindrance rath er than a help to intelligible or appropriate reading, as an exercise of voice. The utterance of the common phrases, "Yes, sir," or "No, sir," will furnish sufficient illustration here. The comma preceding the word "sir," is due to the eye, on the score of syntax, but not to the ear or the voice, on that of sense.

It is in the audible reading of poetry, however, that the defects of current education are most strikingly exhibited, as regards the discipline of the expressive faculties. Poetry, as the language of imagination and feeling, speaking to the heart, properly requires a mode of reading obviously quite different from that of the usual forins of plain didactic prose, addressed to the understanding merely. The word-pictures of the poet paint their imagery on the imagination; the intellect interprets their forms; the heart beats in response to the graphic delineation; and the voice gives expression to a correspondent melody of tone, while it utters the words of the verse. To read poetry aright, therefore, implies the poet's inspiration, imparted to the soul and voice of the reader,-an exalted state of imagination, a sympathetic vividness of feeling, unconscious quickness and acuteness of intellectual conception, a plastic voice and expressive tone. An appropriate course of preparatory discipline of feeling and imagination, is obviously, then, as indispensable to poetic utterance, as the right understanding of the intellectual sense of a sentence, is to the ordinary reading of prose. For this purpose, every grand or beautiful form of nature or of expressive art to which he can resort, with a view to give susceptibility to feeling and imagination or pleasure to taste, now becomes, in the hands of the intelligent teacher, an instrument of power, to aid him in the processes of culture. Now is the time when he feels how deeply he must ever be indebted to the vivifying influence of music, painting, and sculpture, and every chaste form of decorative art, as the effective means of opening the eye of the soul to the vision of grandeur or of beauty, firing the heart with the ardor of inspiration, touching it with the sense of tenderness and love, and refining the taste by the display of true elegance and

grace.

The dry, prosaic, lifeless style in which poetry is too generally read in our schools, is more injurious than beneficial, not merely to the faculties more immediately concerned in the conception or utterance of

poetic composition, but to the action and influence of all those powers, mental and moral, which tend to elevate and refine the soul, and mould the character to the highest forms of excellence. There is something akin to the barrenness of spirit with which the sceptic peruses a page of sacred scripture, in the utterly mechanical manner in which the well-drilled pupil in mathematics or in grammar, is sometimes permitted to read strains of the purest poetry, embodying the sublimest sentiments, and calling for tones of the deepest and most vivid emotion, or even of the most exalted passion.

The general neglect of appropriate means for cherishing sensibility and cultivating taste, in the relation now referred to, is the more to be regretted that it prevails most in that form of education and in that class of schools in which it tells with the deepest effect :—I refer to our common modes of mental cultivation, and to those seminaries in which the mass of our people are trained. The recuperative influences of classical culture, in our higher literary institutions, does something to redeem, in this respect, the omissions and the defects of earlier training. But it is much to be feared that, even in our boasted New England education, as generally conducted, the young who are to receive no such remedial aid for disproportioned and defective cultivation, close their school course without the benefit of a single effort, on the part of instructors, to render their pupils capable of appreciating or expressing the sentiments embodied in the best passages of our own literature and that of the parent land,- -a literature which contains confessedly more of the inspiring elements of pure morality and noble character, as well as genuine beauty, than any that has yet appeared on earth; not excepting even the model languages of classic antiquity.

Instruction in Grammar.—It is but of late that those who prescribe the forms of education or the modes of instruction, have furnished the working teacher with the means of rational and philosophic training for his pupils, in another department of culture professedly occupied with the discipline of the expressive faculties, but, in past years, so formally conducted, for the most part, as to embarrass and retard rather than aid the progress of development. A great change, unquestionably, has taken place in the character of text-books on Grammar; and in this branch of instruction we have recently been provided with valuable facilities for improvement, in several excellent treatises, well suited to the true uses of a text-book,—not a synthetic synopsis of the science as it lies in the mind of the consummate grammarian, but a gradually progressive and practical presentation of the subject, from its simplest elements upward, in a course, at the same

time, so strictly logical, that every step leads, by a law of thought, to another, and so thoroughly practical, that,-to use the not inapt expression of a German instructor visiting one of our American schools, the pupil is made, at every step, to "experience grammar.” Defective Methods.-Still, too many of our teachers cling to the narrow practice of following, in every grammar lesson, the order of a synthetic text-book, in which the subject is admirably arranged for a systematic and philosophic review of the science, but by no means. for the successive steps of progress to the young mind commencing the study of it. The method of such text-books is precisely that which must be inverted in all true, living, oral instruction, or in any rational attempt to introduce a learner to a knowledge of the subject, and to guide him in his first endeavors to reduce it to practice in illustrative forms of exercise. The logic of instruction requires that the whole science of grammar should be first subjected to a rigorous analysis in the teacher's own mind, that its elements may be exhibited individually and successively to that of the pupil, and so become the groundwork of his inductive and intelligent progress from the recognition of facts to that of principles and laws. The practical part of the instructor's business, requires, in this, as in all other branches, a strict compliance with the rule of presenting one element only at a time, but in such succession as to develop the whole subject in easy steps of connected progress,—each perfectly understood and thoroughly exemplified; nothing assumed, but everything proved; nothing merely defined without being reduced to practice.

The Practice of Composition.-Till very recently, in comparison, no branch of education connected so immediately with the discipline of the expressive faculties, has been more faultily conducted than this. Without waiting for the development and efficient action of the reflective faculties, or the power of abstract conception and general thought, the teacher, when he has conducted his pupils through a very imperfect course of grammar and mechanical "parsing," and, perhaps, a little technical rhetoric, proceeds to prescribe a task in composition, on some general theme requiring the thoughts of a mature and capacious mind, besides the command of a skillful pen, for its proper treatment.

Results of Defective Methods of Teaching.-Called thus, without means, to perform a task which leads him entirely away from the region in which his mind naturally and habitually works, -the concrete world of actual observation and of clear conception or conscious feeling, the pupil finds himself unable to do what is required of him as a personal effort. In these circumstances, if he does not actually