“We live,” says one of the legislators quoted,

“in the most beautiful land that the sun of heaven ever shone upon.  Yes, sir, I have heard the anecdote from Mr. Clay, that a preacher in Kentucky, when speaking of the beauties of paradise, when he desired to make his audience believe it was a place of bliss, said it was a Kentucky of a place.  Sir, this preacher had never visited the western counties of North Carolina.  I have spent days of rapture in looking at her scenery of unsurpassed grandeur, in hearing the roar of her magnificent waterfalls, second only to the great cataract of the North; and while I gazed for hours, lost in admiration at the power of Him who by his word created such a country, and gratitude for the blessings He had scattered upon it, I thought that if Adam and Eve, when driven from paradise, had been near this land, they would have thought themselves in the next best place to that they had left.”

We do not aver that the contents of this collection are generally as ludicrous as this specimen; but we do say that the passage quoted gives a very fair idea of the spirit and quality of the book.  There is scarcely one of the North Carolina pieces which a Northern man would not for one reason or another find extremely comic.  One of the reading lessons is a note written fifteen years ago by Solon Robinson, the agricultural editor of the Tribune, upon the use of the long leaves of the North Carolina pine for braiding or basket-work; another is a note written to accompany a bunch of North Carolina grapes sent to an editor; and there are many other newspaper cuttings of a similar character.  The editor seems to have thought nothing too trivial, nothing too ephemeral, for his purpose, provided the passage contained the name of his beloved State.

How strange all this appears to a Northern mind!  Everywhere else in Christendom, teachers strive to enlarge the mental range of their pupils, readily assenting to Voltaire’s well-known definition of an educated man:  “One who is not satisfied to survey the universe from his parish belfry.”  Everywhere else, the intellectual class have some sense of the ill-consequences of “breeding in and in,” and take care to infuse into their minds the vigor of new ideas and the nourishment of strange knowledge.  How impossible for a Northern State to think of doing what Alabama did last winter, pass a law designed to limit the circulation in that State of Northern newspapers and periodicals!  What Southern men mean by “State pride” is really not known in the Northern States.  All men of every land are fond of their native place; but the pride that Northern people may feel in the State wherein they happened to be born is as subordinate to their national feeling, as the attachment of a Frenchman to his native province is to his pride in France.