else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all
around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the
leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to
that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,--a sort
of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility,
a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a
certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are
already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from
the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating
manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,
both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman,
discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a
chemical effect,--that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues
of metal, "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of
sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would
soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies
of the universe." But he observed that "those bodies which underwent
this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring
themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when
this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been
inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic