Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1858-12-10
WINTER EVENINGS.

We do not think we can do our readers a
better service, especially the younger portion
of them, than by calling their especial atten-
ton to the fact, that the sun goes to bed very
early, about these times, and that the interval
between his bed time and theirs, can, to those
who desire it, be made source of enjoyment
and profit, such as the same number of hours
in any other period of the year cannot afford.
In the midst of such a community as ours,
with so many helps and encouragements on
every hand, for mental culture, it seems to us
that the generation of young men and women
who are about to enter soon upon the duties of
active life, ought to be great deal wiser and
better than any generation that has preceded
h EN-.
With the advantages of system of school
education, unsurpassed by that of any in the
world open for the free use of all who have
sufficient command of their time to enjoy it;
with evening schools for adults, and appren-
tees, also thrown open, gratuitously, for the
especial benefit of those who are prevented
by other avocations from devoting the hours
OF the day to study with two courses of pub
lie lectures in which the first talent in the land
is employed to impart the treasures of knowl-
edge and the highest thoughts of genius; with
at a merely nominal price; and with lesser
means of improvement in books, newspapers
and social circles, all around us, it would mani
fest cruel waste of time-a disgraceful neg
lect of opportunities-if any young man or
woman in this community should grow up in
Ignorance, or enter upon the duties of life with
mind barren of knowledge, or an intellect
uncultiyated and unenlarged, by communion
with the thoughts Of the great and wise men
who speak to us always through the printed
page, or with those ofther contemporaries whose
voices they are permitted to hear.
"rhat one man should die ignorant, who had
capacity for knowledge-that were tragedy"
says the philosophic democrat Thomas Car
lyle, ''even if it were enacted twenty times in
a minute" And who, that appreciates the
Baconian apothegm that knowledge is power"
but feels that it is so THAT, in this world of
ours, there are no sadder sights or scenes than
the physical, moral and intellectual wrecks of
manhood-made by the neglect of those
golden opportunities which belong espe-
cially to the period of youth, and which are
never so bountifully spread out for the use and
improvement of the sons and daughters of toll,
as in the long, cold evenings of New England
winter, in New England homes, and by New
England firesides
Let then, the young be mindful of the pres
ent season and its opportunities and now that
the winter has fairly set in, resolve at once,
each for himself, to redeem as many odd mo-
ments as possible from idleness and waste, by
entering upon such a course of reading
or study as may be congenial to their incli-
nations and tastes, and as may be likely to be
of use hereafter So shall their faculties ex-
pand and their minds be strengthened with
new strength, just as the exercise of the mus
cles, in any of the ayocations of honest toll,
strengthens the body and developes all the phys
lcal energies, and so shall the advent of spring
find them in the more full possession of all
those enjoyments, which spring from the reccol-
ections and lessons of well spent hours, and
from the capacity to do and to perform those
duties to themselves and to their fellows which
cannot be accomplished only through the pos
session of that good old Roman faculty, "a
sound mind in a sound body"