The eclectic reader Author:Bela Bates Edwards Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: lies the true sublime of human acquisition. If any attainment deserve that epithet, it is the knowledge which, from the mensuration of the minutest dust of the b... more »alance, proceeds on the rising scale of material bodies, every where weighing, every where measuring, every where detecting and explaining the laws of force and motion, penetrating into the secret principles which hold the universe of God together, and balancing world against world, and system against system. When we s£ek io accompany those who pursue their studies at once so high, so vast, and so exact;—when we arrive at the discoveries of Newton, which pour in day on- the works of God, as if a second fiat for light had gone forth from his own mouth;—when, further, we attempt to follow those who set out where Newton paused, making his goal their starting place, and, proceeding with demonstration upon demonstration, and discovery upon discovery, bring new worlds, and new systems of worlds, within the limits of the known universe, failing to learn all only because all is infinite ; however we say of man, in admiration of his physical structure, that " in form and moving he is express and admirable," it is here, and here without irreverence, we may exclaim, " In apprehension how like a God !" LESSON II. Blindness of Milton.—Charles Wolfe. There lived a divine old man, whose everlasting remains we have all admired, whose memory is the pride of England and of nature. His youth was distinguished by a happier lot than perhaps genius has often enjoyed at the commencement of its career; he was enabled, by the liberality of Providence, to dedicate his soul to the cultivation of those classical accomplishments, in which almost his infancy delighted ; he had attracted admiration at the period when it is most exquisitely ...« less