THE OPAL: A MONTHLY PERIODICAL OF THE STATE LUNATIC ASYLUM. DEVOTED TO USEFULNESS. EDITED BY THE PATIENTS. VOL. IV. UTICA, NEW YORK: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED AT THE ASYLUM. 1854. ADDRESS TO OUR PATRONS. Forty-eight months have vibrated their moments on the engagements and extensions of the Opalians. The divine art of printing has conveyed through numerous and constant agencies the heraldry of Asylumian intellect, and in the varied developments of society, our paper hath been insinuated by the gentleness of humanity, and reciprocated in a fourfold state the harbingers of progression in kindness by exchanges, whose opening leaves hath borne refreshment from the wines on the lees of humanity, well refined by the studied graces of purity, sense, discretion and knowledge, to the great comfort of this retirement, hallowed by the superintendence of wisdom and virtue. In the diffusion of thought by the arts, its curiosity and character are enhanced by the manner in which it is communicated; and the respectful interchange of sympathy, and of emotions incident to nature that assimilate and affiliate the multiform interests and conditions of the human kind are so promoted by interchanges as to excite a brotherly regard for the correspondences, and a desire to advance their intelligences anew, when apprehended as the instrumentality of reasonable reliances. If equals be added to equals the products are equal, saith the reasoner of intellects, as he leads the way over the roughness of the mind's path to the delightful walks of truth and duty; and in accordance with the fact admitted and demonstrated by experience, the eye of wonder, of trust, of gratitude, admiration and love is turned toward the accomplishments of the Opalians and their friends with a constancy, a spirit of self-reliant and appreciating strength, encouraging to the weary or doubting, whose immaturity in intellectual corruscations tendeth to distrust and inaptitude. Has the standard of the intellect been raised ?-has the discrimination between the barriers been distinctly promoted ?—has humility, the eldest child of good sense-has heaven-born charity, love and the humanities been promoted in the noble use of reason, by minds once beclouded, distrained by anguish, and restrained by "science and religion"?-has the high-born spirit of philanthropy shed its pure |