and contemplating the possible of moral and intellectual advance towards
perfection. Thus we live by hope and faith; thus we are for the most
part able to realize what we will, and thus we accomplish the end of our
being. The contemplation of futurity inspires humility of soul in our
judgment of the present.

I think the memory of children cannot, in reason, be too much stored
with the objects and facts of natural history. God opens the images of
nature, like the leaves of a book, before the eyes of his creature,
Man--and teaches him all that is grand and beautiful in the foaming
cataract, the glassy lake, and the floating mist.

The common modern novel, in which there is no imagination, but a
miserable struggle to excite and gratify mere curiosity, ought, in my
judgment, to be wholly forbidden to children. Novel-reading of this sort
is especially injurious to the growth of the imagination, the judgment,
and the morals, especially to the latter, because it excites mere
feelings without at the same time ministering an impulse to action.
Women are good novelists, but indifferent poets; and this because they
rarely or never thoroughly distinguish between fact and fiction. In the
jumble of the two lies the secret of the modern novel, which is the
'medium aliquid' between them, having just so much of fiction as to
obscure the fact, and so much of fact as to render the fiction insipid.
The perusal of a fashionable lady's novel is to me very much like
looking at the scenery and decorations of a theatre by broad daylight.
The source of the common fondness for novels of this sort rests in that
dislike of vacancy and that love of sloth, which are inherent in the
human mind; they afford excitement without producing reaction. By
reaction I mean an activity of the intellectual faculties, which shows
itself in consequent reasoning and observation, and originates action