It is not in us; we were fashioned here For a more tranquil feeling, such as home Sheds on two hearts, whose true and lasting sphere Is round the holy hearth; hearts do not roam, When they are pledged by the young shoots that come, Like the green root-twigs, sweetly to renew Our life in their dear lives, which are the sum Of all our after being, where we view Heaven, as the soul's fond smile those rose-lips tremble through.
I HAVE already described setting out for the law school at L----. After a long and tedious ride over rocky hills, we arrived late in the evening at the town. It is situated on a river, on each side of which are meadows of the most fertile soil, one mile in breadth. On the east side of this river, a short range of mountains rise, grand and imposing, from the generally level face of the country about them. Here is perhaps the finest scenery in New-England. You have a great variety within one half hour's walk. Gardens of exotics, well-tilled farms, more resembling gardens than farms, mountains, a river, woods, cottages, princely edifices; here a street like a city, and the next turn brings you into something simply rural.
Here too might be found, at a later day, the finest school in the country, perhaps in the world, if we may judge from the talent employed in its management, and the splendor of the scale upon which it was got up. The founders of this school are probably in our country the only instance on record of men who had gained high places in the literary world, leaving all their hard-bought honors, and the ease of professorships in the first literary institution in the country, to embark in the thankless task of keeping school. This school has not succeeded according to its merits--as what school does? It enjoyed a temporary reputation and success, as long as it was the fashion and a novelty; and after the curiosity of the public was satisfied, it diminished, and no longer numbers its three hundred pupils. It is the same with our clergymen. People in our country are for ever changing their ministers. It is so with servants, ploughs, and all machinery, moral and physical. Variety, curiosity, experiment, are the words that govern. We are forever tearing things to pieces, to see what they are made of, and how they are constructed. There is not and never has been a permanent private school in America; and our endowed academies sink and rise, and only continue to exist, because from their legal nature they cannot die.