PREFACE. THE value of Education, seems every year, to be more clearly appreciated. Both practical and philosophic minds, are labouring to elevate its standard. It is felt to be the safeguard of our Country. And so important is the attitude in which she stands, with regard to other nations, as well as to the people within her own bounds, that the character of the rising generation, may determine, not merely the degree of her prosperity, but her very existence as a republic. Knowledge, without a due culture of the motives of action, may lead but to moral mischief. It puts into the hands a weapon of power, but gives no assurance, whether it shall be wielded for good, or for evil. Every parent, every teacher, every writer of a book for schools, should act as a guardian for the young, against the dangers of knowledge without principle. Are they not as hostages, for the four millions of children in these United States, promising both a past and a future age, that they shall neither wreck the institutions which antiquity has hallowed, nor put in peril, the interests of a race unborn? The volume now presented as an assistant in the art of reading, has a higher aim, than simply to aid in elocution, or declamation. It contains lessons of republican simplicity, of the value of time, of the rewards of virtue, of the duties of this life, as they take hold on the happiness of the next. These objects are kept in view, both in its narrative, and didactic essays, in its prose, and in its poetry. It has been constructed with care, and with pleasure, for the "sons of my people." May it bear on its pages, a blessing to those, who now under the discipline of education, will so soon emerge from their tutelage, and take the places of the fathers. God grant that they may stand forth as trees, whose "leaves are for the healing of the nations;" like the olive, cheering and enriching those around, or the oak, bearing its honours to future generations. HARTFORD, CONN. July 4th, 1839. L. H. S. |