steeds bounding up hill, over plain and down valley, yet many pleasing and romantic associations cluster, too, in True, his shrill, unearthly our mind about the iron horse. scream that scream which, according to Sam Weller, seems to say, "Now here's two hundred and forty passengers in the werry greatest extremity of danger, and here's their two hundred and forty screams in vun ". - is not captivating. His broken-winded puffs, the sooty cinders he leaves in his track, and the rattling of the carriages which he hurries over the rails, are not fitted to kindle the imagination; nor is the confused, jumbled medley into which his arrow-like flight huddles all the features of the landscape, very pleasing to the eye. But, then, with what velocity he bears the impatient business man to his destination, or the homesick traveller to the arms that are aching to embrace him! It is the nearest approach yet known to the wishing-cap of the Oriental tale, which enabled its wearer to fly in an instant to any desired spot on the globe. Certainly the winged horse of the muses never made such time in his flights over Parnassus, as the coal-fed, steambreathing monster, with pulses of fire and sinews of steel, makes over his iron pathway. Then, again, how beautiful to the looker-on is the spectacle of a railway train, as it shoots by him with a swiftness that renders its inmates invisible! How like an effect of enchantment or some magical illusion it seems, as it rushes along its sinuous way among mountains and forests, darting across rivers, spanning abysses, surmounting or piercing hills, and flying on and yet on to its destination as unerringly as a migratory bird flies toward the pole ! Truly there is poetry in the iron horse, more of the poetry of motion than in the bound of an antelope, more of the poetry of power than in the dash of a cataract. Fact, in our times, has overtaken fancy, and we need no longer seek for the sublime in creations which are imaginary and untrue. "Look," says an eloquent writer, "at the railway train at night, with its spangled banner of smoke trailing far into the distance! Can any imagery be more picturesque? None, - not even the demon yagers of the Hartz Forest, sweeping through the air on their midnight chase. To us the rush of steam on its swift and glorious errands, with the population of a village at its heels, seems as well calculated to awaken poetic inspiration as any of the stupid fables of heathen mythology." The writer might have added that such a spectacle is far better fitted to kindle the imagination than the most felicitous of these fables, when we reflect that that complex fabric, the steam-engine, the masterpiece of modern art and science, was once the laughing-stock of jeering thousands, and once but the phantasy of a boy's mind, as he sat before a fire, and, in seeming idleness, watched a column of vapor rising from the spout of a teakettle. Facts not Is knowledge power, as it is so often asserted Faculty. to be? That depends." All the facts the memory can hold cannot of themselves make a man wise. He may have a head crammed with them, and yet, if they are not organized into faculty, remain a feeble, shallow, and conceited man. Facts, of themselves, are worthless; it is only in their associations, consequences, and bearings on each other, - only as, acted upon by the mind, they support or refute systems and theories, - only, in short, as they become the generators of ideas,- that they have any value. Suppose a lecturer tells me that a certain quartz stone is round; he has increased my knowledge by two facts, the nature and form of the stone; but of what value are these facts in themselves? Have they made me intellectually stronger, or a bit the wiser? Assuredly not. But, as a key to an aqueous theory of geology, they may be of infinite moment. If, perceiving that the round stone must have been once an angular fragment, broken off from some rock of quartz, I am led to ask: "How came it to break off?" and "How came it to be round?" the answers may be a whole system of geology, perhaps an entire system of the universe. In short, it is not in the number of facts which one has acquired, that his mental power lies, but in the number he can bring to bear on a given subject, and in his ability to treat them as data or factors of a new product, in an endless series. Though there must be data before there can be generalization, yet, as Herbert Spencer says, "ungeneralized data, accumulated in excess, are impediments to generalization." When does a man understand a truth? Never fully, till he has discovered it for himself; otherwise, it may lodge in his mind, but has no home there. Doubtless the dullest man in the community, by simply opening a scientific treatise, may learn a thousand things unknown to Aristotle or Bacon. But a few easy acquisitions from a book will not lessen the distance between a modern dunce and an ancient sage. A dwarf perched on a giant's shoulder may see further than the giant, but he is a dwarf still. The acute and patient thinker of the dark ages, who never suspected that the atmosphere in which he lived had weight, was nevertheless a philosopher of profound understanding; while he whose lecturer has taught him ex cathedra that the atmosphere presses with a weight of fifteen pounds to the square inch, may, notwithstanding the superiority of his information, remain a feeble-minded, shallow man. INDEX. ABSURDITIES, Some common ones, | Autobiography, revived, 309, 310; 295, 296. Adams, John, his irascibility, 183. his portrait, 275. Adulterations, of food, etc., 273. its deceptions, 310; character of Æschines, his statue in the Vati- BACON, FRANCIS, on poetry, 37; can, 224. Age, old, the happiest season of life, 301. quoted, 57; ran deeply in debt, Bailey, Samuel, quoted, 170. Alexander the Great, his lucky Barbers, their wit and sunny tem- sickness, 145. Alva, the Duke of, his statue de- Appius, one of the Roman Decem- Arnold, Matthew, as a lecturer, 84. per, 287-289; their forbearance, Barnard, Lady Anne, 2. Being and Seeming, 169–171. Bells, 195, 196; why they crack, 196. Bentham, Jeremy, on poetry, 36, 37; his refusal of a ring, 110. Bolingbroke, Lord, as a writer, 36. Ashley, Lord, his good-humor un- Boucicault, Dion, quoted, 174. Authors, their works mirror their Boyd, A. K. H., D. D., his pet words and solecisms, 225. Boys, "smart ones, 116; some |