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Show 58 WESTERN WILDS. and poetry was inwrought with ray childish nature. But my father was still Frenchman enough to be given to the contemplation of vast systems of social philosophy that peculiarly French philosophy which takes great and comprehensive principles on trust, and believes that man, once they are taught him, charmed by their beauty and symme-try, will gladly embrace them. The federation of the world, the equal-ization of conditions, the abolition of poverty these were the themes that charmed his leisure hours, when not employed in the struggle to further increase the inequality that was already great between him and his poorer neighbors. How pleasing is that philosophy by which great principles are first to be established, upon which society and govern-ment are to be constructed like geometrical figures, and people mod-eled to fit and adopt them ; but how much more practical and sensible that cautious progress of your people and the English, which is taught by events, and is sometimes willing to learn humbly at the tribunal of facts. " On such a nature as mine the daily hearing of these things had momentous influence. Had I been bred to trade, it might have gone well. Commerce would have corrected the errors of an overheated imagination, and contact wr ith men as they are, proved a healthful cor-rective to too much contemplation of them as they might bt,. But my ambitious parents, who were vastly improved in circumstances by the prosperous years that succeeded the general peace, and the return tide of English travel, determined to bestow upon their only son a classical education, at that day in Geneva thought to be the key to all prefer-ments in church or state. Even now I feel a pang at what must have been the keenness of their disappointment. Once entered upon my classical studies, a new world was opened to my impressible mind. Mythology I found but dull how could so grand a people have be-lieved in such filthy deities? but the heroes of classic annals set my very soul on fire. Could it be that such men had lived men that died by battalions for the honor of their country, or ran upon their swords rather than survive her liberty? I panted as I read, I breathed the very spirit of Livy ; I shed tears over what other school- boys called the dull pages of Tacitus. In moments of such enthusiasm, I had but to close my eyes and recite the sonorous lines, and at once before me rushed the awful pageant of the returning conqueror: his triumphal car, the captured enemies of his country walking behind it, the blare of trumpets, the tramp of victorious legions, while the welkin rang with the shouts of Roman thousands. I struggled with the patriots of Thermopylae, I defended the bridge with Horatius, with Dcntaltis |