verbal memory blighted the diviner faculties of comparison and judgment.  We hold that the ideal system of education, to which through coming centuries men can only approximate, must present to the child the precise step in knowledge which he waits for, and upon which he is able to raise himself with that glow of pleasurable activity which God gives to exertion directed to a comprehensible end.  The feeblest mind is capable of assimilating knowledge with a satisfaction the same in kind as that which rewarded the maturest labors of Humboldt or Newton.  There are sequences of facts every one of which, imparted in its natural order, brings an immediate interest.  It is no nebulous scheme of combining instruction with amusement which is to be sought.  One might as well look after the Philosopher’s Stone or the Elixir of Life.  Good things are to be had upon no easier terms than privation and work.  But there is a wide difference between a man toiling to gain material comforts for those who are dear to him, or laboring to enlighten and reform his own spirit that he may give good gifts to his generation, and a beast whipped round a treadmill to the din of its own everlasting clatter.  It is only work whose end shall, in some faint degree, be intelligible, which is demanded for the child; and with this sort of work we believe that it is very possible to furnish him.  But our philanthropies in this direction may not be wrought by deputy; they must be aimed at the few, and not at once at the many.

The reader of “Levana” will find much incidental commendation of those true relations of intellectual sympathy and confidence between parents and children which in this country are far rarer than they should be.  Seldom do we hear the average American citizen speak of either parent in that tone of tender and respectful companionship with which the average Frenchman pronounces “ma mere” or “mon pere.”  Seldom do we see that relation between an eminent man and his mother which, in the Old World, has been exemplified from Augustine to Buckle.  Some of the causes of this have been admirably set forth in a recent essay in these pages.  The article by Gail Hamilton in the April number of the “Atlantic” contains much uncommon sense, which our lady-readers cannot ponder too often.  All honor to those mothers who, meeting extreme and unexpected poverty, turn themselves into drudges that their children may be decently clothed and wholesomely fed!  But dishonor to those women who stunt their own intellectual powers, which should educate and accompany the immortal souls of their sons and daughters through this world and perhaps another,—­and this, in order that their bodies may be fed luxuriously, or dressed in lace and ruffles to vie with the children of richer neighbors!  There can be no tolerance for the indolence—­we emphasize the word—­which elects a mechanical routine instead of those harder mental efforts through which a mother’s highest duties may be comprehended