chievous play-hours, which make the neighborhood of a school a thing to be eschewed by all decent society. The advantages to health of mind and body are no less to be esteemed than the elegance of carriage and general gracefulness which would inevitably take the place of the uncouth, romping manner, or awkward, stiff want of manner, not only of our country people, but even of the inhabitants of our cities.
In the small degree in which music now is introduced into schools, it is appropriated to the forms of religious worship. This is well, and might be much extended, when, by a thorough study of the theory of music, the vast treasury of religious strains which the genius of the Old World has accumulated, shall be put within the powers of execution of more learners. Music affords, indeed, the only means of persuading the soul of childhood into any thing that may bear the name of worship, at the early age before experience has revealed to the soul its necessities, and opened its eyes upon the great truth which solves the problem of evil, and gives the second birth. But music does do this. It awakens presentiments which may be said to be the wings which the condescending Deity occasionally fastens upon the child, to raise him into the empyrean where he shall by and by intelligently dwell. Music, as we have intimated above, is in a region above sectarianism, and affords a common ground upon which the divided in opinion may meet; and if all religious instruction (we do not mean all moral science) which is imparted to the young could be confined to that which can be conveyed in music, that perplexity of mind upon the subject, which is the generating cause of most of the speculative infidelity of modern times, might never take place, because the mind would not turn to the greater questions of life, before it was sufficiently enriched by experience, and matured in judgment, to cope with them. The Protestant education does not wholly err in exercising the understanding upon these themes. We are not arguing for what Fenelon calls, and means to commend it, "the profound darkness of the true faith." We would only have the æsthetic element developed, as nature meant it should be, before the mere
