between the false and the true, between pleasure and happiness, early know your duty to yourselves, your country, and your God!

I will but add to these crude, but heart-engendered, observations, a few lines, embodying my own sentiments, and in a form much more impressive than I can command:

"We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;

In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best."

I have somewhere met with a little bagatelle, somewhat like this:

Apollo, the god of Love, of music, and of eloquence, weary of the changeless brilliancy of Olympus, determined to descend to earth, and to secure maintenance and fame, in the guise of a mortal, by authorship. Accordingly, the incognito divinity established himself in an attic, after the usual fashion of the sons of genius, and commenced inditing a poem—a long epic poem, plying his pen with the patient industry inspired by necessity, the best stimulus of human effort. At length, the task of the god completed, he, with great difficulty, procured the means of offering it to the world in printed form. The Epic of Apollo, the god of Poetry, fell, predoomed, from the press. No commendatory review had been secured, no fashionable publisher endorsed

its merits. Disgusted with the pursuit of the wealth and honors of earth, Apollo returned to Olympus, bequeathing to mortals, this advice:-" Would you secure earthly celebrity and riches, do not attempt intellectual and moral culture, but INVENT A PILL!”

Instances of the successful pursuit of knowledge under difficulties frequently present themselves in our contemporaneous history, both in our own country, and in foreign lands. Indeed, the history of the human mind goes far toward proving that, not the pampered scions of rank and luxury, but the hardy sons of poverty and toil, have been, most frequently, the benefactors of the race. Well has the poet said :

"The busy world shoves angrily aside

The man who stands with arms a-kimbo set,
Until occasion tell him what to do;

And he who waits to have his task marked out,
Shall die, and leave his errand unfulfilled."

The Learned Blacksmith, as he is popularly called, acquired thirty, or more, different languages, while daily working at his laborious trade. He was accustomed to study while taking his meals, and to have an open book placed upon the anvil, while he worked. A celebrated physiological writer, alluding to the habits of this persevering devotee of philology, says, that nothing but his uninterrupted practice of his Vulcan-tasks preserved his health under the vast amount of mental labor he imposed upon himself.

Another of our distinguished countrymen, now a prominent popular orator, is said to have accumulated food for future usefulness, while devoting the energies of the outer man to the employment of a wagoner, amid the grand scenic influences of the majestic Alleghanies. The early life of Franklin, of the Mill-boy of the Slashes, of Webster, and of many. others whose names have become watchwords among us, are, doubtless, familiar to you, as examples in this respect.

Looking upon the busy active world around me,as I sometimes like to do-from behind the screen of my newspaper, seated in the reading-room of a hotel, I became the auditor of the following conversation, between two young men, who were stationed near a window, watching the passing throng of a crowded thoroughfare.

"By George! there's Van K," exclaimed one, Kwith unusual animation.

"Which one,-where?" eagerly interrogated his companion.

"That's he, this side, with the Byronic nose, and short steps-he's great! What a fellow he is for making money, though!"

"Does it by his talents, don't he?-nobody like him, in the Bar of this State, for genius,-that's a fact-carries everything through by the force of genius!"

"Dev'lish clever, no doubt," assented the other,

"but he used to study, I tell you, like a hero, when he was younger."

"Never heard that of him," answered the other youth, "how the deuce could he? He has always been a man about town-real fashionable fellowpractised always, since he was admitted, and everybody knows no one dines out, and goes to parties with more of a rush than Van K- -, and he always has."

"That may all be, but my mother, who has known him well for years, was telling me, the other day, that those who were most charmed with his wit, and belle-letter scholarship, when he first came upon the tapis, little knew the pains he took to accomplish himself. He exhibited the result, not the machinery,' she said, but he did study, and study hard, when the young fellows were asleep, or raising hh— !

"As for that," interrupted the other, "he always did his full share of all the deviltry going, or I am shrewdly mistaken !”

"Nobody surpasses him at that, any more than at his regular trade," laughed his companion-"oh, but he's rich! Jim Williams was telling me (Jim studies with Sand Van K-) how he put down old S— the other day. It seems S had been laid on the shelf with a tooth-ache-dev'lish bad-face all swelled up-old fellow real sick, and no mistake. Well, one morning, after he'd been gone several days, he managed to pull up, and make his appearance at the office. It was early-no one there but

Van Kand the boys-Jim and the rest of the fel lows, tearing away at the books and papers. So old S dropped down in an arm-chair by the stove, and began a hifalutin description of his sorrows and sufferings while he had been sick-quite in the 'pile on the agony' style! Well, just as the old boy got fairly warmed up, and was going it smoothly, Van K- bawled out:-Y-a-s! Mr. S! will you have time, this morning, to look over these papers, in the case of Smith against Brown?' Jim said he never saw an old rip so cut down in all his life, and, as soon as he went out, there was a general bust up, at his expense!"

"How confounded heartless!" exclaimed the elder youth, rising—" by Heaven, I hope a man needn't set aside the common sympathies and decencies of humanity, to secure success in his profession, or in society!" and as he passed me, I caught the flush of manly indignation that mantled his beardless cheek, and the lightning-flash of youthful genius that enkindled his large blue eyes.

"What are you doing there, sir ?" inquired one of the early Presidents of our Republic, of his nephew, who was standing before an open writing-desk, in his private apartment.

"Only getting some paper. and pencils, sir," replied the young man.

"That stationary, sir, belongs to the Federal Government!" returned the American patriot, impres