evening class, and the mother was more than glad to have her little girl to learn to sew. As I was leaving, she went to the door with me, and said, "You have a cold afternoon, honey, to be out hunting them up. I hope the Lord will take care of you, and keep you well, and bless the ladies in their work." "Yes," we replied, "and you must ask him to do so." "Oh, I do," she eagerly rejoined; "every morning, when I ask the Master to take care of me and my family, I ask him to bless these teachers. I remember the time when you could not go about, asking us poor blacks to go to school, let alone teaching us. Oh, it's the Lord's doings, child; no man did the work." And with the benediction of the good and grateful woman falling pleasantly upon the ear, we again turned our steps homeward. "I am always glad to see any one from Bos. ton," said a man to me at whose house we were calling; "we have such good friends there. We have friends true and tried here, (and he called some by name,) but outside of Baltimore our best friends are in Boston. They send us these Northern teachers with their Northern habits of teaching, and we are grateful for it, and we would not forget it." These people know who their friends are, and find instinctively the path into which their feet must turn if they would gain real liberty. We imagine the young man in one of our evening. classes, who said, "If I did not know the letter A, I should know too much to vote the conservative ticket," was a true representative of FANNY E. ELLIS. Secretary. his race. Baltimore, Dec. 23d, 1866. SUGGESTED For Friends' Intelligencer. BY A CHERRY TREE IN BLOOM. Fair tree, that with thy beauty greets Of one whose brief young life is o'er. A sad, yet tender grace bestows. From home and friendship far away, Though Faith, like stars that gem the night, "God never permitted us to form a theory too beautiful for His power to make practicable "-Phillips. Men take the pure ideals of their souls, And never dream that things so beautiful So, counterfeits pass current in their lives, And starvingly, and fearingly they walk The thoughts of beauty dawning on the soul What ties the planets bound, there The answering law he found! Paul, Luther, Howard, all the crowned ones, These truths to them, more beautiful than day, And deeds at which the blinded gazers sneered, 'Till those who mocked their young ideal, In meekness owned it was the real. Thine early dreams, which came in "shapes of STEAMER ST. LAURENT, at Sea, MY DEAR YOUNG FRIENDS:-We are now within one day's sail of Brest, and I propose to furnish a brief account of our voyage. Let me remark, in the first place, that this steamer is probably not inferior to any vessel afloat, being large, new, and, in all particulars, well appointed. She is admirably officered and manned, furnished with engines of one thousand horsepower. The table arrangements, sleeping ac commodations, and attendance, are equal to those of a first-class hotel; in short, she appears to be all that the most fastidious traveller could desire. We sailed from New York on the 20th instant, at 2 o'clock, P. M., amid the booming of cannon and the cheers of the crowd that thronged the pier. Just below the noted Fort Lafayette we lay to" for some time, to await the rising of the tide, so that it was about five o'clock before we reached Sandy Hook, and were ready to discharge our pilot, and had fairly entered upon our ocean race. A sumptuous dinner was spread at half past four o'clock, to which some two hundred ladies and gentlemen sat down, but a small fraction of whom were able to sit it out. The "mal de mer," as the French say, began its work, though there was as yet but a gentle swell. Some of our party have been sick a goodly portion of the voyage; others only for the first day; my. self merely a little qualmish at intervals for about twenty-four hours. The truth is, I de termined not to be sick-not to give way-and I braved it out: the mind in this, as in all other matters, has large control over the body. the gulf, at the bottom of which was the beautiful mass of polished mechanism, that, thanks to the genius of Watt, was driving us so speedily through the briny sea. One of the most striking points connected with this voyage has been to me the unutterable loneliness of the ocean; whole days would pass in which a single bird, or a far distant ship, would be the only objects to meet the vision. Morning after morning have I mounted the deck, and scanned again and again the entire horizon without perceiving even a vestige of life! Whilst we were within two hundred miles of land, we saw some sea gulls. I recollect that about a half dozen of these birds leisurely followed us on the second day for about fifty or sixty miles, and then quietly gave up the chase. The stormy petrel we have seen a very few of, and possibly one or two other birds; but nothing to remove from the mind the sensation above alluded to. My French serves me a pretty good purpose, though I confess a decided preference for English as yet. We amuse and interest ourselves, however, every day in examining the illustrated French works that are placed at the disposal of the passengers. We have had fair winds nearly all the voyage, and they have, in no small degree, contributed to the rapid progress we have thus far made. The labor of attending to the sails in a steamer such as this is immense! Vastly more, I apprehend, than in a corresponding sailing vessel, for the latter, when she once takes the wind, generally holds it for a long stretch, but the steamer pushes right onward, regardless alike of wind and sea; hence, she must modify her sails for every different stratum of air she may chance to pass through or run into. About thirty sailors are almost constantly engaged in the adjustment and readjustment of our sailing gear, so that the shrill silver whistle of the boatswain may be heard at nearly all hours of the day and night, calling willing hands to their laborious task. At half-past nine o'clock that night, I mounted the promenade deck. All was silent, save the regular aud continuous thumping of the engine, and the rush of the mighty sea as it dashed into spray, and rebounded from the ship's side in sparkling phosphorescent foam, looking as though illuminated by an artificial light. Six men were at "the wheel" perform- A voyage such as this might be supposed ing, in disciplined stillness, their important monotonous; such, however, is by no means the work. One man was at the stern compass, on case, for every day brings up new thoughts, the face of which a shrouded lantern threw its feelings, and subjects of interest. To those who ray; another was closely scanning the amidship are fond of high living, it may be remarked compass; the officer in command of this mighty that on the ocean steamers five meals per day mass, with her living freight of four hundred are furnished, and on this line, the preparation souls, was pacing his narrow" passerelle," look- of these meals is a work of high art, in which ing momentarily out on to the deep; the sail- the most elaborate resources of French cookery ing master was conning the ship on the weather are brought fully into play. But the most requarter; two old tars were in the bow with markable fact of all, it seems to me, is the total speaking trumpet in hand, watching" en avant;" loss of consciousness of danger. The wonderthe red and green lights were duly set upon the ful combination of strength, skill and intellilarboard and starboard quarters, a lantern gence to which you have entrusted your life, gleamed in the foretop, and everything looked becomes, after a time, a new creation: it ceases anug" for the night; so I prepared to retire; to be a ship and crew precariously floating upon first, however, casting an assuring glance down the fathomless waters; it is a world, where 1 people walk, saunter, lull, eat, sleep, talk and we see every day, so when our ears are used to I commenced this letter at noon to day, but this being our last day together, many interruptions have occurred. I believe, therefore, I will reserve its completion till we arrive in Paris. GRAND HOTEL, Paris, 5th mo. 3d, 1867. make such brilliant achievements in abstract thought, knowing, as they generally did, no language but their own. But the Greeks did not escape the effects of this deficiency. Their greatest intellects, those who laid the foundation of philosophy and of all our intellectual We had a splendid entrance in Brest, and culture, Plato and Aristotle, are continually led dropped anchor amid the booming of cannon away by words; mistaking the accidents of lanand a general burst of hilarity. At 2 we left guage for real relations in nature, and supposby express for Paris, arriving at 5 the following that things which have the same name in ing morning. The vegetation here is far more advanced than it can possibly be about Philadelphia, although we are 8 or 9 degrees farther North. I have been too busy to write more at present. All the splendor of Broadway and Chestnut Street together might be put in or taken out of this city without any one knowing the difference. C. S. H. (Continued from page 192.) The only language, then, and the only literature, to which I would allow a place in the ordinary curriculum, are those of the Greeks and Romans; and to these I would preserve the position in it which they at present occupy. That position is justified, by the great value, in education, of knowing well some other cultivated language and literature than one's own, and by the peculiar value of those particular languages and literatures. the Greek tongue must be the same in their own essence. There is a well known saying of Hobbes, the far-reaching significance of which you will more and more appreciate in proportion to the growth of your own intellect: "Words are the counters of wise men, but the money of fools." With the wise man a word stands for the fact which it represents; to the fool it is itself the fact. To carry on Hobbes' metaphor, the counter is far more likely to be taken for merely what it is, by those who are in the habit of using many different kinds of counters. But besides the advantage of possessing another cultivated language, there is a further consideration equally important. Without knowing the language of a people, we never really know their thoughts, their feelings, and their type of character: and unless we do possess this knowledge, of some other people than ourselves, we remain, to the hour of our death, with our intellects only half expanded. Look at a youth who has never been out of his family circle: he never dreams of any other opinions or ways of thinking than those he has been bred up in; or if he has heard of any such, attributes them to some moral defect, or inferiority of nature or education. If his family are Tory, he cannot conceive the possibility of being a Liberal; if Liberal, of being a Tory. What the notions and habits of a single family are to a boy who has had no intercourse beyond it, the notions and habits of his own country are to him who is ig norant of every other. Those notions and habits are to him human nature itself; whatever varies from them is an unaccountable aberration which he cannot mentally realize the idea that any other ways can be right, or as near an approach to right as some of his own, is incon There is one purely intellectual benefit from a knowledge of languages, which I am specially desirous to dwell on. Those who have seriously reflected on the causes of human error have been deeply impressed with the tendency of mankind to mistake words for things. Without entering into the metaphysics of the subject, we know how common it is to use words glibly and with apparent propriety, and to aceept them confidently when used by others, without ever having had any distinct conception of the things denoted by them. To quote again from Archbishop Whately, it is the habit of mankind to mistake familiarity for accurate knowledge. As we seldom think of asking the meaning of what ceivable to him. This does not merely close | but about the political, religious, and even do- But if it is so useful, on this account, to know the language and literature of any other cultivated and civilized people, the most valuable of all to us in this respect are the languages and literature of the ancients. No nations of mod ern and civilized Europe are so unlike one another, as the Greeks and Romans are unlike us; yet without being, as some remote Orientals are, so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to enable us to understand them. Were this the only gain to be derived from a knowledge of the ancients, it would already place the study of them in a high rank among enlightening and liberalizing pursuits. It is of no use saying that we may know them through modern writings. We may know something of them in that way; which is much better than knowing nothing. But modern books do not teach us ancient thought; they teach us some modern writer's notion of ancient thought. Modern books do not show us the Greeks and Romans, they tell us some modern writer's opinions about Greeks and Romans. Translations are scarcely better. When we want really to know what a person thinks or says, we seek it at first hand from himself. We do not trust to another person's impression of his meaning, given in another person's words; we refer to his own. Much more is it necessary to do so when his words are in one language, and those of his reporter in another. Modern phraseology never conveys the exact meaning of a Greek writer; it cannot do so, except by a diffuse ex. planatory circumlocution which no translator dares use. We must be able, in a certain degree, to think in Greek, if we would represent to ourselves how a Greek thought: and this not only in the abstruse region of metaphysics, mestic concerns of life. I will mention a further aspect of this question, which, though I have not the merit of originating it, I do not remember to have seen noticed in any book. There is no part of our knowledge which it is more useful to obtain at first hand-to go to the fountain head for-than our knowledge of history. Yet this in most cases we hardly ever do. Our conception of the past is not drawn from its own records, but from books written about it, containing not the facts, but a view of the facts which has shaped itself in the mind of somebody of our own or a very recent time. Such books are very instructive and valuable; they help us to understand history, to interpret history, to draw just conclusions from it; at the worst, they set us the example of trying to do all this; but they are not themselves history. The knowledge they give is upon trust, and even when they have done their best, it is not only incomplete but partial, because confined to what a few modern writers have seen in the materials, and have thought worth picking out from among them. How little we learn of our own ancestors from Hume, or Hallam, or Macaulay, compared with what we know if we add to what these tell us, even a little reading of cotemporary authors and documents! The most recent historians are so well aware of this, that they fill their pages with extracts from the original materials, feeling that these extracts are the real history, and their comments and thread of narrative are only helps towards understanding it. Now it is part of the great worth to us of our Greek and Latin studies, that in them we do read history in the original sources. We are in actual contact with cotemporary minds; we are not dependent on hearsay; we have something by which we can test and check the representations and theories of modern historians. It may be asked, Why then not study the original materials of modern history? I answer, it is highly desirable to do so; and let me remark by the way, that even this requires a dead language; nearly all the documents prior to the Reformation, and many subsequent to it, being written in Latin. But the exploration of these documents, though a most useful pursuit, can not be a branch of education. Not to speak of their vast extent, and the fragmentary nature of each, the strongest reason is, that in learning the spirit of our own past ages, until a comparatively recent period, from cotemporary writers, we learn hardly anything else. Those authors, with a few exceptions, are little worth reading on their own account. While, in studying the great writers of antiquity, we are not only learning to understand the ancient mind, but laying in a stock of wise thought and observation, still valuable to ourselves; and at the same time making ourselves familiar with a number igious, and even do- h picking out from e learn of car o llam, or Maccar ments and thra ies, that in the minas ad check the r study the org prior to the entary act t in learning la a couple Ose anthers at the s of the most perfect and finished literary compo- to come. mit of being transferred bodily, and has been COAL SUPPLY OF THE WORLD. Even as mere languages, no modern European language is so valuable a discipline to the intellect as those of Greece and Rome, on account of their regular and complicated structure. Consider for a moment what grammar is. It is the most elementary part of logic. It is the beginning of the analysis of the thinking process. The principles and rules of grammar are The question started some time since as to the means by which the forms of language are the length of time our coal was likely to last, made to correspond with the universal forms of has led to inquiries by our Government as to thought. The distinctions between the various the coal supply of other countries, and the reparts of speech, between the cases of nouns, the sult must be very reassuring to those (if there moods and tenses of verbs, the functions of par- be any such) who fear that the world will be ticles, are distinctions in thought, not merely in short of coals some three or four thousand years words. Single nouns and verbs express objects hence. The information appears in the form and events, many of which can be cognized by of a blue-book, containing reports which have the senses but the modes of putting nouns been received from secretaries to various Britand verbs together, express the relations of ob-ish Embassies and Legations respecting the jects and events, which can be cognized only by prospects of a supply of coal, if need be, from the intellect; and each different mode corres-abroad. The return includes reports from Ausponds to a different relation. The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic. The various rules of syntax oblige us to distinguish between the subject and the predicate of a proposition, between the agent, the action, and the thing acted upon; to mark when an idea is intended to modify or qualify, or merely to unite with, some other idea; what assertions are categorical, what only conditional; whether the intention is to express similarity or contrast, to make a plurality of assertions conjunctively or disjunctively; what portions of a sentence, though grammatically complete within themselves, are mere members or subordinate parts of the assertion made by the entire sentence. Such things form the subject-matter of universal grammar; and the languages which teach it best are those which have the most definite rules, and which provide distinct forms for the greatest number of distinctions in thought, so that if we fail to attend precisely and accurate ly to any of these, we cannot avoid committing a solecism in language. In these qualities the classical languages have an incomparable superiority over every modern language, and over all languages dead or living, which have a liter ature worth being generally studied. tria, Baden, Bavaria, Belgium, Brazil, France, Prussia, Russia, Spain, the United States, and the Zollverein. France, in 1865, produced 11,297,052 tons, and imported 7,108,286 tons, of which, 1,455,206 tons were imported from Great Britain. Every year shows an increase of coal consumption in that country. Prussia is rich in mineral fuel, especially in very good coals. The working of the coal pits is rapidly and continuously increasing. No coal is exported from Russia, which is supplied in a great degree from other countries, prominently Great Britain. During 1863, the latest date from which statistics are supplied, the coal produce of Spain amounted to 401,297 tons. No coal is exported from that kingdom. Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and other continental countries all seem to have well-stocked coal cellars to fall back upon. In the year ending June 30th, 1866, the produce of the United States was 20,553,550 tons, being an increase of 3,447,049 tons as compared with the previous year. It has been estimated that the capacity of the Pennsylvania mines alone is fully equal to 20,000,000 tons a year. In nine counties of the State of Missouri there are about 3,500 miles of coal lands, which average a mean thickness of 11 feet. Professor Snealow's computation makes out 38,000,000,000 tons of coal in these nine counties alone. In 40 counties of the same State there is said to be sufficient coal to last 3,000 years of 300 working days each, if an average of 100,000 tons were mined every day. Professor Rogers has estimated that the Illinois coal fields are six times as extensive as those of But the superiority of the literature itself, for purposes of education, is still more marked and decisive. Even in the substantial value of the matter of which it is the vehicle, it is very far from having been superseded. The discoveries of the ancients in science have been greatly surpassed, and as much of them as is still valuable loses nothing by being incorporated in modern treatises: but what does not so well ad |