Solitude and Adversity.

SHAKSPEARE.

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference; as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind;
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
"This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am."
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

WHAT stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; And he but naked, though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

Samson's Lament over his Blindness. MILTON.

O Loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies! O, worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased:
Inferior to the vilest now become

Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me; -
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own;
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse.

Without all hope of day!

O first created Beam, and thou great Word,
"Let there be light, and light was over all,"
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
The sun to me is dark

And silent as the moon

When she deserts the night,

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
That light is in the soul,

She all in every part, - why was the sight
To such a tender ball as the eye confined,
So obvious and so easy to be quenched ?
And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused,
That she might look at will through every pore?.
Then had I not been thus exiled from light,
As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried! but, O, yet more miserable-
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave;
Buried, yet not exempt,

By privilege of death and burial,

From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs;
But made hereby obnoxious more
To all the miseries of life,

Life in captivity

Among inhuman foes!

PAUSES.

Grammatical punctuation serves, to a limited extent, to mark the pauses which must be made in reading aloud; but these pauses, alone, are not sufficient to secure an intelligible and impressive delivery. Pauses must frequently be made in reading where no grammatical points are used. These are called rhetorical pauses.

LESSON LXXIII.

RHETORICAL PAUSES.

RULE I. Pause after the nominative, when it consists of more than one word.*

EXAMPLES

The fashion of this world.... passeth away.

To practise virtue.... is the sure way to love it.

Note. A pause may be made after the nominative, when it consists of only one word, if we wish it to be particularly observed; as, “Adversity.... is the school of piety."

On the Improvement in the Construction of SchoolHouses. D. P. PAGE.

WHATEVER the structure and conveniences of the first school-houses in New England were, there is no account of

....

* The place of the pause is indicated by the marks The attention of the pupil should be called to the passages that occur in the lesson, in which the rule may be reduced to practice. By thus attending to one thing at a time, in each lesson, the principles of elocution will finally be well understood.

them, to my knowledge, handed down to the present generation. It is sufficient praise for our ancestors that they established free schools, and provided accommodations for them of any kind. Nor is it necessary that we should go farther back than fifty years, to find structures, between which and the modern ones a comparison sufficiently striking for our purpose may be traced. Indeed, I may go no farther than to some existing relics of the past generation; and it may be that all who hear me have already in their own mind, and perhaps have had at some past time, connected with their own schoolday experience, the very pattern which will answer our present purpose.

In examining quite a large number of these declining monuments of ill-adapted ingenuity, I have found that a few prominent characteristics mark them all. It seems to have been deemed essential that these edifices, built for the accommodation of all, should have a place in the very centre of the district, determined by actual admeasurement; and wherever the rods and links should fix that point, whether hill or valley, forest or meadow, "highway or byway," - there, and there only, must the edifice be erected, and thither must the children wend their course, perhaps far away from the village, far away from the principal road, (an object of no small consequence, particularly in winter,) far away from a suitable site for any building, to gain their first impressions of school.

It would seem also to have been considered quite essential that each of these buildings should be furnished with the most ample fireplaces, "gaping wide," and at the same time with slanting floors, the seats rising one above another, suggesting to the modern visitor the idea that they were designed for vast roasting-places, in which each victim could have an equal chance to see and appreciate the towering flames, as they rose in columns to the elevated mantel-piece, and roared up the incandescent flue. Of the capacity of these fireplaces, none can better judge than those who have taken their "turn" of a winter's morning, to "make the fire" for a country school, some twenty-five years ago. Who does not well remember the rotund backlog, of a fathom long; the ample bowlders, from a neighboring stone wall, for andirons; the "forestick," of a sled's length, to support the superincumbent mass of clefts, small wood, and chips, to the amount of the third part of a cord, to be consumed for an ordinary day's warming of the district school-house? Who does not recollect the merry sound of axes, when the larger boys spent most of the afternoon in chopping at the door the fuel for the next day's burning?

I have mentioned the sloping floor, upon which it was difficult to stand at ease, if not to stand at all; and which, in the ascent, might remind one of the worthy Pilgrim's Hill of Difficulty, and in the descent, of his approach to the Valley of Humiliation, in which, in the quaint language of Bunyan, "it were dangerous for one to catch a slip." I might go on to mention the inconvenient fixtures of these rooms; the seats from which dangled many an aching limb, hopeless of finding rest or a resting-place; the forms without backs, upon which many a weary urchin sank-to sleep; and slept - to fall; and fell - to electrify the little community with an extempore solo, in which, like some discarded politician, he deigned to "define his position."

I might also mention the ill-jointed wainscoting by which the room was on all sides amply ventilated; the shattered ceiling; the scanty light; the marks of juvenile industry, in the shape of scorings and engravings upon the desks: the grotesque drawings upon the walls; the scanty playground; the absence of all out-door accommodations; the dreary aspect about the premises of many of these buildings; the gloomy loneliness of the location, where, at certain seasons of the year at least, in the language of Sprague, "the rank thistle nodded in the wind, and the wild fox