It has been iterated and reiterated, that there is no royal road to knowledge. This is true of knowledge, as it is true of any thing that is worth having. And this brings to our recollection a manifestation of spirit displayed by some portions of the "rising generation" to which we have not yet adverted. This is called the non-mercantile idea--a growing dislike to all manual and merely commercial pursuits, and an over-fondness for what are known as the learned, and more especially the literary professions. This desire, we fear, proceeds often from a wish to avoid labor; and, where this is the case, we can assure all such that literature is not the sphere for indolence.
We neither impugn the honesty nor ignore the talents of the "rising generation." We would only tender them a parting advice: Think, learn, and act, reverently and cautiously, and in the spirit of that philosophy which has won for England her most enduring laurels--which taught her Newton to discard for years, until fact supported theory, what was perhaps the broadest glimpse of truth ever vouchsafed to the human mind. Do so, as they dread the realization of the outline drawn by the master-hand of Jean Paul Richter--"The new-year's night of an unhappy man." His graphic picture we hold up to the gaze of the "rising generation." The season is appropriate. We are all fond at this time of retrospection, and are full of resolves for the future. Perhaps we may strike some chord now in jarring dissonance, that may yet vibrate to divinest harmony.
"An old man stood on the new-year's midnight at the window, and gazed with a look of long despair, upward to the immovable, ever-blooming heaven, and down upon the still, pure, white earth, on which no one was then so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near him; it was covered over only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he brought nothing with him out of the whole rich life, no thing with him, but errors, sins, and disease, a wasted body, a desolated soul, the breast full of poison, an old age full of remorse. The beautiful days of his youth turned round to-day, as spectres, and drew him back again to that bright morning on which his father first placed him at the cross-road of life, which, on the right hand, leads by the sun-path of virtue into a wide peaceful land full of light and of harvests, and full of angels, and which, on the left hand, descends into the mole-ways of vice, into a black cavern, full of down-dropping poison, full of aiming serpents, and of gloomy, sultry vapors.