rally poetic temperament, which destroys ten for the one it crowns. I remember Albert restless in his cradle, and weeping at melancholy music; and as to Lucy, the difficulty with her was always to keep her tranquil. You have, my dear lady, applied excitement where you should, in my humble opinion, have removed it." "But would you have had them grow up in ignorance?" inquired the lady. "That is so like a woman," said the old bachelor, smiling sadly; "jumping from one extreme to the other. I talked of undue excitement, and you immediately fell back upon extreme ignorance; an excitement is the destruction of health and strength, and is to mind the very pestilence of education. The children were doing very well, learning as much as at their age they ought to learn without forcing-that is all that children should do." "But some learn more quickly than others, my dear sir." "The rose would have been healthy enough in the conservatory, I suppose," said the doctor. "Bless you, sir, it would have lived long enough to make a timber tree if I wanted it; but such fierce forcing cuts them off even before they blossom. It's a principle in nature, sir; my old governor never would have any thing forced beyond nature. 'Thomas,' he used to say to me, 'let us help nature; let us assist the old gentlewoman as well as we can--she deserves it of us; and it is our duty, as well as our interest, to keep friends with her, for there's one thing certain, she won't stand no nonsense.' He was a plain-spoken Scotchman, sir; but, like all of his country, he had a great acquaintance with nature." The doctor made no further observation; but a glance at Mrs. Erris showed him that her face was bathed in tears. "So they do; some require keeping back, others bringing forward, but, with both, time is the only safe developer and strengthener. I never knew an instance where a precocious child was not the better for being kept back. It is positively offensive to come in contact with those forced children; to find mammas and INDIA AND CHINA. -THE Overland mail from papas absurd enough to mistake indications of India, with dates from Calcutta to the 23rd talent for talent itself, and treating you to little miss or little master's poetry or prose. Well, my dear lady," he added, ashamed of his pet- ance of the Indian news is limited to the fact of the annexation of Scinde to our Indian empire. In Hyderabad, the capital of Scinde, treasure and jewels amounting, it is said, to one and a half million sterling, have been discovered. Doubts have been entertained if this treasure trove is to be considered prize-money. The matter has been referred to the Queen in Council. In the mean time, the Governor-General has declared Scinde to be a British province, abolished slavery therein, and appointed Sir C. Napier to be Governor; and also declared all transit duties abolished, and the Indus open to the ships of all nations. Scinde is said to be a most fertile district, which, when cultivated, will repay every cost tenfold, and render the territories of the Indus something like the banks of the Ganges. March; Bombay, April 1st; Canton, 22nd February, arrived in town on Sunday. The importalready made known by the telegraphic despatch, tishness, "I have at least to thank you for your patience; you have listened to me, and 1 thank you. I will go, if you please, to-morrow, if it were only to prove how I value your forbearance; but just look at our flowers and this new forcing-house, which, I think, you have not seen, and which our gardener would have, because the clever family have one." Mrs. Erris looked at the flowers; the doctor having set aside the subject they talked of, she knew would not return to it; so she admired the plants, and the good old gentleman's anxiety for Lucy and Albert was for a few minutes obliterated by the interest he felt in his favorite flowers. On leaving the conservatory for the forcing-house, they found the gardener busied with some plants that had been placed upon a stand; amongst them was a white moss rose, its green leaves fading; the buds, through whose soft moss the faint streak of white was more or less visible, hung their heads, from their feeble and seemingly twisted stems. "It won't do, Tom-all your care won't do now," said Dr. Russel to the gardener; "if you had been content to urge, not force the plant forward, it might have lived and flourished in the conservatory. Now it is gone-gone for ever." "It was so beautiful, sir," said the man; "I never saw any thing more beautiful. I didn't like to be out-done in early flowering by Mr. Diggons's gardener, and got more heat on; and I'm sorry to say this is not the first plant that has served me so; the blossoms have dropped off many; so that, after all my care, and though willing to sacrifice the plant for one good flowering, it won't always give that, but die awayright away." The Governor-General was at Agra. He has ordered the celebrated Somnauth gates to be locked up there. Bundelkund remained still in an unsettled state, some disturbances having occurred along the frontiers of Cutch, facing Scinde; but the rest of India was tranquil. Dwarkanauth Tagore has been excluded from his family caste, in consequence of his repeatedly eating with "the unclean Europeans." The most conflicting accounts were circulated respecting the state of Cabul: Akhbar Khan is no longer popular there, and another was said to have seized the government. Dost Mahommed was going back from Lahore to Cabul, but it was not known how he wonld be received there. He wished to be aided by the Sikhs, but they did not seem inclined to give him any assistance. The interest of the Chinese news is almost ex clusively of a commercial nature. Doubts are said to exist of the durability of any arrangement now entered into. The Chinese were busy in repairing all their forts, and in strengthening their positions in the different places attacked last year. Trade was dull, but was expected to revive speedily.-Court Journal. For the Eclectic Museum. THE PRESS AND THE AGE. FUGITIVE THOUGHTS. From the Vierteljahrs Schrift. In the good old times, a hundred years ago, or so, a vast dealless was printed than at present. People did not read as much as they now do, but they talked a great deal more. The organ of the Press, as it is now called, was comparatively in the helpless state of a chrysalis, while the organs of speech were developed in full vi that practical egotism of individuals, which so strangely belies the philanthropy of theories and the charity of institutions. Literature, in those days, was merely a sprinkling, a passing cloud, from behind which the cheering rays of the social sun burst forth the merrier; in our times, she shrouds the heavens in thick and portentous gloom, and were any one to represent this reading generation by a flock of geese, who forgetting their lively cackle in the storm, with contemplative gravity look up askance to the heavens; the comparison, if not very refined, would at least be an apt gor, by their volubility in furnishing the one, as predicable of a social state, where prattle, pot-eloquence, sycophancy and gal- so much more is written and read than lantry of the age. The Frankford Post ar- spoken, where familiar and cheerful interrived only twice a week; the Bremen In- course is struck with the palsy, and very telligencer of Wit and Science appeared many of the social virtues, besides old-fashonly once a month; but yet often enough ioned and honorable gallantry, have become to serve throughout the holy Roman Em- defunct. Whence come the wild notions of pire, in the nightly orgies of the Academi- many scribbling and reading women, but cians, or at the tea-table of the literary ep- from their much reading, from their peev icure, as the accredited guides and oracles in questions of general interest, natural phe nomena, and standards of taste and talent. How much sense and nonsense, how many sallies of wit and of vain conceit, were not wasted on the desert air, in discussing the ish habit of shaking the fruit off the tree of knowledge, and from the fact that the busy and abstracted lords of creation, do not so much after the old fashion pay their submissive homage at the shrine of beauty, by flowery speeches and wire-drawn compli passing events of the day; such as the ments; that they do not every moment ofbloody strife between Frederic and Maria- fer incense to the ladies as to their acTheresa, the paper-war between Bodmer knowledged and petted little despots, who and Gotsched, the elevation of Madame by the fundamental laws of nature are disPompadour to the throne, and Christian qualified from holding a seat and giving a Wolf's recall to Halle, the severe winter of 1740, and Lord Anson's voyage around the world. The same exhalations ascend from the heads of men in our day, like steam produced by the contact of water with iron at a white-heat, but an infinitely greater portion of the component particles are precipitated daily, and in thousands of places, in the shape of types on paper. From this important change in the intellectual atmosphere of the world, proceeds in truth almost every thing, whether it be for the better or for the worse, in great matters or in trifles, which distinguishes the age of vote in the graver councils of men. In those days, when a man delighted in his own cogitations on passing events, he generally brought them to some gossiping market; he looked about for people to whom he could unburden his political weather-wisdom, his scientific projects or his artistical enthusiasm. That which now goes by the name of Society, consists of two classes: one, writing down their thoughts on politics, commerce, sciences and arts, while the other read what these have written. Interchange of thought through the medium of conversation, has the semi-weekly snails-post (Schnecken- only this in common with that carried on Post), the bag-wig, and of demonstrative philosophy, from the age of steam, kidgloves and absolute ideas; from the age marked by the mighty impulse given to science and art, the revolution effected in the views of both rulers and people, and by the controlling power of public opinion; as well as by the great schism which has supervened between theory and invention, between the right of conscience and the cravings of mind, the desolation and yet sober awakening of the masses, together with through the medium of printing, that they produce no result, abstractedly considered; for after all, every thing which at each succeeding moment is embraced under the heads of science, literature, political economy and the whole domain of research, is surely nothing else but the sum total of all the great and little accounts, which are constantly adjusting between millions of great and little individuals. In an age where every body is writing; where words appearing in a book are fre quently hardly weighed more scrupulously unfold themselves in the remotest perspecthan in daily colloquy, the writer will doubt- tive. Once, the country-village was comless te permitted also to scatter on paper paratively lively, and vocal with the coma few thoughts on the aspect of the exist- motion of debate; as has been said, even a ing era; thoughts which in the good old hundred years ago, there was comparatively time he would have wasted in talk, while now, having the comfortable assurance, that no one will contradict him, while writing, he can think himself to be in the right, until he sees some criticism of his pages, and afterwards too. much more tale-telling and less printed news; while now, with the newspaper in his hand, the citizen quid nunc holds converse with every portion of the habitable globe, in the crowded coffee-room, or in the rail-car, without bestowing a single word on his neighbor, to give a jog to the intellectual faculties of either. Mankind, when they had no printing, were divided in detached groups, each of The Press is that main engine of development, which for three centuries, uninterruptedly and in a progressive ratio of speed, is carrying the human race towards some goal yet undiscernible and unknown. It whom enjoyed its own immunities and has left mankind, what they ever were; characteristic identity. Their thoughts but it is a leaven (Gährungs-stoff) which and affections occupied the space of these has given a characteristic scope and direction to that momentous disjunction which is going on between us and antiquity, and has infinitely multiplied energies and relations, and then again simplified them. With the art of printing commenced a new era in the culture of the human mind, which before had enjoyed a holiday of two thousand years, since acquiring the accomplishment of writing. The Press is a machine embodying an idea, by whose developments, the heir-loom of History itself, so to speak, has been re-constructed, to the effect that it incessantly throws off the antiquated materials of power, of thought and of passion, descended from our forefathers, in ever varying, ever increasing, ever bolder, finer and more elaborate patterns. As some hallowed inclosures, leaving the surplus, if any, to make excursions into the fields of nature and of religion. At first, indeed, before they were merged in states and kingdoms, communities resembled isolated galvanic elements, within the contracted spheres of which, the affections and aspirations of the soul were forever gamboling in self-exhausting gyrations. Time gradually added other elements; but slow was the progress which men could make in knowledge and power through the mere instrumentality of tradition and manuscript, both indifferent conductors, and the battery, though its multiplied parts endowed it with increasing force, soon wore itself into decay. Then the Press at once became the communicating medium of the manual labor was the productive genius of ethereal fluid, and by its infinitely superior the primitive and middle ages; so machine- adaptedness, raised the civilized world to ry is of modern times-but still it is the same genius which is at work. We are so accustomed to the common, all-pervading vehicle of thought, to the ability of scanning every movement in the worlds of matter or of mind, that it is with no small difficulty we are able to place ourselves in a bygone age; and the superficial thinker is utterly at a the proud eminence which it now occupies on the heaving galvanic pile of mind, which seeks to outstrip the farthermost bounds of the very heavens. Every unit, whether great or small, from the individual to the state or the nation, feels itself, in the midst of the whirl and commotion of conflicting powers, identified loss to comprehend the intellectual great- in its thoughts, purposes and actions, as a etrically opposite to the earlier ages of the and the bustle among claimants and objecworld. Every pleasing and noble feature tionists, among the contending masses, and ness of certain periods which were destitute of the present facilities for disseminating and interchanging ideas. The noiseless tread of the historical muse, led onward only by traditional legends, strikes us as gloomily as unearthly steps in the haunted chamber of Ugolino; while an old man would become bewildered with terror in beholding how, by the necromancy of printing, the hidden workings of the times are unmasked, how the levers and shuttles pass and repass with inconceivable swiftness, the wheels buzz and fly, the woofs are reeled off, and everywhere images and designs part of one undivided whole, and all may perceive how the materials of fate are disposed of in the fervent heat incident to the concentration of their powers at the poles of the ever-working battery; and how thus destiny is every instant evolved, be it through the agency of man himself, or be it in his despite. It is pre-eminently this universal sensitiveness of the body social, this ever present consciousness of historical dignity, which stamps the present century as differing so strikingly and essentially from the last, so faintly acted upon by the Press, and which renders it so diam in the aspect of our times, as well as every equivocal and fatal distortion, springs from this psychological revolution; from this source flow all those schemes and efforts in state, in science and in art, which characterize the present generation. in the consultations among Savans at the couch of diseased humanity, grows ever louder and more confused. Nothing can transpire in any of the provinces of metaphysics, politics, religion, art, trade or science, which does not produce manifold and Even long after the invention of printing, heterogeneous results, in a society rendercomparatively but a very few privileged ed thus sensitive through the agency of the individuals were enabled to watch the Press. Where one sees only health and course of the world, to confront and mea- safety, another scents a gangrene; the sure the events which passed before their identical fact calls up to the imagination of eyes, by the past, as recorded on the page of one a series of the most flattering images, History, thence to draw definite conclu- to that of his neighbor it portrays nothing sions, to set the horoscope of the city, the state or the age, and to announce all this to their contemporaries. With the progress of this "black art" the feelers of society became proportionably more numerous and but the rake's progress to one the beginning of a felicitous consummation-to the other the beginning of a gloomy end. The one cannot comprehend how it is that the world does not advance more readily, uni acute, its vision into futurity sharpened, versally, or in this, and that and the other and the one half of what is now printed is particular quarter, where genius such as his made up of judgments abstractedly pronoun- applies the lever. Another is astonished ced by this conscientious and self-critici- again to find his transcendent abilities bafsing age, whether in a sober mood, or mis- fled, and like Jonah becomes fretful at the guided by passion, on the past, present and failure of his prophecies; but is not the future. It happens, however, in the arena less positive, that with such elements of of literature, as it it does in the British Parliament. There, every speech being directed to the chair, the speaker is the focus, or rather the centre of all the radii of debate, and in a somewhat analogous manner every author or scribbler, in all his plans or strictures on the affairs of the world, ad discord and destruction within, the world cannot long hold together. All admit, however, even those who draw the most favorable auspices for the future from the present, that with the present striking advance of certain elements of power, other certain elements which caused the peculiar bloom dresses himself to the Public, that presiding and glory of departed ages, have become hydra, which holds in terrorem the power extinct; but while A beholds in this deof life or death in its grasp, over all Maga- ficiency, or rather substitution of energies, zines, Journals, and Gazettes. The Public the prognostics of a universal dissolution, and the Speaker-both much less speaking, B adopts it as merely another round in the than spoken to have no perceptible influ physiological ladder of the species. Those faculties of man, by which in observing, experimentalizing, analyzing, dissolving, and again combining, condensing and making deductions, he penetrates deeper and farther into outward nature and into his own, have manifestly been exalted and enlarged through the revolution effected by the press. This is more especially apparent in the great strides which the present age has made in the various departments of natural science. ence over the issue, the result of the debate; the same as in judicatory assemblies, a thousand valuable or silly thoughts fall to the ground, and that which is finally effected, often has no relationship, either to the efforts of genius expended, or to the end contemplated; so the assertions and demurrers, the demands and the refusals, the triumphs and the lamentations of the political press, are daily set at naught by the executive tribunal of History. The universal development of the go-ahead principle, which in modern times has been so wonderfully accelerated, is chiefly the effect of the inherent and ever augmenting power of the press; and consequently, while the plot thickens, while so many conflicting phenomena appear, while what is past, as well as that which is yet to come, arouses qual acquisitions. The single-handed thinkthe most opposite passions; the energies er and seeker after truth, cramped and fetof the press receive increased stimulus, tered by authorities, could make but feeble, The rich and fair legacy of learned lore, transmitted from antiquity, even within the precincts of natural philosophy, was preserved during the middle ages by a few men of towering genius, and, though with considerable drawbacks on the one hand, it obtained on the other some slow and uneunproductive, and withal hazardous explor- the young brood of new discoveries are ing expeditions into the hidden chambers carefully nursed and fed after the most apof nature's laboratory; and consequently proved rules of dietetics. the efforts of genius either soared away The natural sciences are the boast of the into the clouds, or else diverged into the age-yes, and in their alliance with induswinding and obscure paths of a labyrinth, try, have made it arrogant. It is reasona where arose on some circumscribed basis of experiments, the speculative structures of the theosoph, the astrologer and the alchemist. The seeds of science, so vigorously deposited by the ancients, were bare ble to suppose, however, that the achievements of the human mind, subsequent to the laws established by Keppler and by Newton, as yet have made but very few stages in its boundless career. Here the ly kept scathless during the iron-age. The prospect is lost in distance; the re-actions press prepared the soil to receive the seed, on society, the re-modelling, emancipation and scattered it abroad; it speedily pro- and ennobling of the whole system flowing duced a thousand-fold, and now the entire from a conquest of nature's forces, in great domain of civilized life, is clothed in luxu- things or in small, in the aggregate or in the riant verdure, and a stately crop of true abstract, it is impossible to compute. But knowledge, hides, if it cannot choke, many when this new movement first became apa rank weed, the seed of which the press parent, about fifty years ago, after the great has, in its heedless race, also dropped. and important discoveries had been made The same thought, which called forth a in chemistry and in physic, mankind were general interchange of mind, gave to sci- affected somewhat in the manner of a man ence the principle of vitality, no longer of who for the first time travels on a rail-road. a stunted growth, a stagnant vegetation, Though mounting the car very cautiously, and this vitality and growth kept exact and apprehensive of not being able to enpace with the increase of books. Once, dure the rapid motion, he soon becomes the science of natural philosophy was a reconciled to the novelty, and in a little rigid, compact mass, easily scanned and while begins to suggest that the speed mastered by one mind. Mathematics, might very well be increased, without either inconvenience or danger. Just so people spoke then, in verse and in prose, in half jest and full earnest, of the gigantic undertakings of mind, of the flight of Icarus, and pennis non homini datis. But soon one became accustomed to the rushing locomotive of science, whose scintillations were as many seeds of the utile dulce; and now the faction of science and the multitude cried out vehemently to the other multifarious arts, fa presto, and the impatience to gain and to enjoy infinitely out Astronomy, Chemistry, Botany, Physic and Metaphysics, lay all huddled together in the brains of the Doctor mirabilis. In proportion, however, as the magic circle, which the press had thrown around the philosopher and thinker, became more and more intensely electrified with this vitality, the mass became more fusible, and the materials of science more redundant. Soon it could no longer be scanned, much less mastered by individual minds; it separated into ever various fragments and ramifications, each of which required its master strips the sober and legitimate march of workman, and thus was set on foot that division of labor, that unfailing distribution, will suffice; in that we may see reflected that constant gathering and re-issuing (Wieder-abgeben) of materials, which at the present day gives to the activity of genius a feature so much resembling a mathematical concatenation of productive mechanism, or rather of a fraternity of skilful insects. That which instinct effects in the little community of bees, a general wakefulness and sharp-sightedness bring to pass in the Republic of Science-all that has been done at every point, and all that is yet to be done. Inspired by the common impulse, the student knows as by intuition, which flowery chalice he must crush in order to extract the purest honey; cell is added to cell as by rule and compass in the prolific hive of scientific literature, and improvement. One prominent example all the phantastic expectations, anticipations, misconceptions, misconstructions and fallacies through the medium of which one generation throws a halo of imaginary glory over the darkness of those yet unborn. Mankind have scarcely succeeded in moving over the surface of their planet at the rate of forty miles per hour, scarcely do they anticipate with any degree of certainty, that the rail-road will infuse a renovated nervous system into the body social, before they grasp, no one can tell how many degrees higher, and pant for the immediate realization of the antiquated hobby, which so often is honored with fruition only in our dreams: they would fain fly on |