Discerns beyond the abyss of night
The dawn of uncreated light."

It is by the constant accession of cultivated minds that society is gradually to improve, and its pleasures to be augmented. There is no

companionship like that which is created by wisdom and knowledge. In that delightful intercourse, hours are but as minutes, days fly like hours away. These pleasures are in a measure open to all. Once mankind were bound down to toil. Their whole energies were exhausted in supplying their commonest wants. Now they have pressed into their service the great agencies of nature, fire, and water, and air, and while they are accomplishing their appointed tasks, men may resort to the halls of science, and the galleries of art, the lecture rooms of philosophy and literature. In our republic in short, the grove of Academus is to be revived, and there will be seen walking in it, not a few philosophers alone, but the whole mass of the people.

Permit me, ladies and gentlemen, to congratulate you on the signs we see multiplying around us of the rise and progress of a literary spirit in our city. It gave me the sincerest pleasure to hear that another course of lectures was to be

commenced for this season, enlisting so much and such a variety of talent, learning and taste. To that enterprise I shall gladly contribute, if the one in which I myself have engaged does not promise to consume all the time I can with propriety divert from the duties of an arduous profession. We, who have embarked in these experiments, call upon all good men and true to come to our aid. There is nothing more wanted to give an impulse to the onward progress of our city than a higher literary and scientific culture, than institutions of a public character, which shall bring the mind and talent of the community into closer contact and warmer sympathy, and thus enable them to act with greater power and efficiency on the mass. We have a climate unsurpassed in the world, and a position second to few on the continent. There must grow up here a large and splendid city. Let it not be a vast, barbarian, unintelligent body, but animated by a great, a noble, a cultivated soul.

We call upon the ministers of religion. Every thing which spreads abroad light and intelligence is congenial with their great purpose of enlightening and reforming the world. Christianity, kept back from mankind through four thousand years of barbarism, was reserved for the

fulness of time, when the world should have become sufficiently cultivated to receive and perpetuate a spiritual religion; and every thing now which developes the intellect, and makes man a being of thought and reflection, instead of a creature of the senses, prepares him more thoroughly to comprehend, and more deeply to be affected by those divine words which are spirit and life.

We call upon the patriot to aid us, the patriot who must be more and more convinced by the experience of every year, that the fate of our republic is entirely involved in the problem, whether a people spread over so vast an extent of territory, increasing with unexampled rapidity, and receiving into its bosom each year nearly a hundred thousand of foreign ingredients, can be made and kept sufficiently intelligent to govern themselves and secure their own happiness. We ask him to reflect on the melancholy spectacle of a great nation, overflowing with wealth, with physical comfort and every natural resource, but without taste, without literature, without refinement, degraded by ignorance, and engulfed in the pleasures of the senses. We ask them if the delusion is never to be dispelled, that life is to be

spent in dull drudgery to acquire the means of living, without the least reflection how those means are to be used in procuring the greatest possible enjoyment? We ask him if there is to be but one pursuit over the length and breadth of this land, absorbing and subordinating to itself every other, the pursuit of wealth, which, when accumulated,

enjoyed only in precise proportion to the enlargement of the mind, and the cultivation of the taste?

We invoke the aid and encouragement of parents, who are connected with the future by bright hopes, as well as with the past by tender recollections. While you gaze with unutterable love upon your rising offspring, and realize whose blood runs in their veins, whose name they are to inherit, does there arise no solicitude in your breasts how they shall bear their part in the great line of existence, what standing they shall assume among men of sense and education, how they may be inspired with high aims and noble purposes, how secured from low pursuits and vicious indulgences? Be assured that next to true religion there is no other guaranty so certain for their safety, their prosperity, their honorable career through life, as an early and

decided taste for moral, intellectual, and literary culture. In this young; free, and enterprising country, where change is written so legibly on all things, nothing can be more chimerical than the hope of transmitting family distinction sustained only by wealth. The genius of our institutions is altogether against it. No where has Mind obtained a supremacy so entire. Wealth may here be an accessory, and a comfortable appendage to greatness, but the estimation of humanity is too high among us to make a man a mere appendage to his possessions.

Finally we appeal to woman, in whose heart every enterprise for human good is sure to find a warm and a powerful advocate. When we tell her that the cause in which we are engaged, is the endeavor to elevate and refine our species, she recognises it as the cause in which she has ever been engaged since the beginning of time. When we describe to her a state of higher mental and moral culture, and of course accompanying it a greater refinement of manners and correctness of deportment, she welcomes the prospect as a state of things where her gentle virtues will be best appreciated, and the sphere in which she moves be most replete with honor, happiness, and contentment. We do not flatter