absorbed in despair. They linger but for a moment. Their look is onward.
They have passed the fatal stream. It shall never be repassed by them,--no,
never. Yet there lies not between us and them an impassible gulf. They know
and feel, that for them there is still one remove farther, not distant, nor
unseen. It is the general burying-ground of their race.
J. Story.


XXXVI.

CLASSICAL LEARNING.

The importance of classical learning to professional education is so
obvious, that the surprise is, that it could ever have become matter of
disputation. I speak not of its power in reining the taste, in disciplining
the judgment, in invigorating the understanding, or in warming the heart
with elevated sentiments; but of its power of direct, positive, necessary
instruction. There is not a single nation from the north to the south of
Europe, from the bleak shores of the Baltic to the bright plains of
immortal Italy, whose literature is not embedded in the very elements of
classical learning. The literature of England is, in an emphatic sense, the
production of her scholars; of men who have cultivated letters in her
universities, and colleges, and grammar-schools; of men who thought any
life too short, chiefly because it left some relic of antiquity unmastered,
and any other fame too humble, because it faded in the presence of Roman
and Grecian genius.

He who studies English literature without the lights of classical
learning, loses half the charms of its sentiments and style, of its force
and feelings, of its delicate touches, of its delightful allusions, of its