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of all organized beings, nor to look upon her with the eyes of affectionate children. 
The case is not altered when they are sent to any of the schools, whether suburban or 
remote from the city of their birth ; for in the walks which are then taken, as a part 
of the system, they are made to march, during the stated period, only for the health 
of the body, in formal columns, and not allowed to delay to examine any natural 
object, nor even to turn their eyes either to the right side or the left. And thus 
they quit these seminaries as ignorant of the operations of nature as if they had 
continued to dwell in the centre of the most crowded metropolis, or had been 
denied all use of the organ of sight. This important period of life, when they are 
so susceptible of receiving beneficial impressions from the examination of the 
works of creation, being allowed to pass unimproved, the parent imagines he has 
discharged his duty to his children if he then places them at the entrance of the 
paths which lead to wealth, to honour, to glory, or to power. But the fondest 
hopes may be disappointed, the best laid schemes for arriving at distinction may 
be frustrated, and the unsuccessful candidate may be compelled to retire from the 
busy mart, and to close those books and correspondence which he trusted would 
have proved the instruments of his gain, and betake himself to an obscure or soli¬ 
tary abode, far from the smoke of cities and the hum of men. How irksomely 
must pass his days, what a dreary and desolate void must be his existence, if, from 
ignorance of its alphabet, the book of natural wisdom lies open before him in vain, 
“ --where, beneath the white-armed beach, 
By valley’s stream, or hillock’s verdant crown, 
Her simple lesson nature waits to teach.” 
But suppose the greatest success to have attended his efforts, and that he has 
become the possessor of “ woods, and lawns, and long-withdrawing vales.” His 
bosom may dilate when his eye surveys the fruit of his toil and his gratified ambi¬ 
tion, and his ear may be regaled with the lowing of his cattle on a thousand hills ; 
but all these he must leave to another, nor can it be said that while in possession 
of them his mind was more improved, or even as much, as that of the ploughman 
who tilled his acres, or the herd who tended his flocks, if the latter, and not the 
former, saw and understood, and traced to their source, the operations of nature 
continually taking place around them, and which could alone render his lands pro¬ 
ductive, and his position an object of vulgar envy. 
An able divine (the Rev. W. Jones, of Nayland) has well observed—“ Let a 
man have all the world can give him, he is still miserable, if he has a grovelling, 
unlettered, indevout mind. Let him have his gardens, his fields, his woods, his 
lawns, for grandeur, plenty, ornament, and gratification: while at the same 
time God is not in all his thoughts ; and let another have neither field nor gar¬ 
den, let him only look at nature with an enlightened mind—a mind which can see 
and adore the Creator in his works, can consider them as demonstrations of his 
