LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Chn^-p.Ji..^ uopyright No. Slielt_.5^ ^f ^^:^?i^r'^ '^" James H. West, Publishes L%^1^ 174 High Street .C'l C 1^ TWO CnriES B^CElVED COPYRiaHT, 1897, By JAMES H. WEST. Angels of Growth ! of old, in the surprise Of your first vision, wild and sweet, I poured in passionate sighs my wish unwise That ye descend my heart to meet, — My heart so slow to rise ! Now thus I pray: — Angelic be to hold In heaven your shining poise afar, And to my wishes bold reply with cold Sweet invitation, like a star Fixed in the heavens old. Did ye descend, what were ye more than I ? Is't not by this ye are divine — That, native to the sky, ye cannot hie Downward and give low hearts the wine That should reward the high ? Not to content our lowness, but to lure And lift us to your angelhood, Do your surprises pure dawn far and sure Above the tumult of our blood, And starlike there endure I Wait there, — wait, and invite me while I climb ; For, see, I come ! — but slow, but slow ! Yet ever as your chime, soft and sublime, Lifts at my feet, they move, they go Up the great stair of time. — David A, Wasson, With Seeing Eye, and conscience true, Still Doing What We Can, The Happy Life comes full in view. For childhood and for man. And then, as Wisdom's lore we trace. And Nature's beauty con. Life's meaning looks us in the face, — Soul daily Farther On. CONTENTS PAGE The SEEiNa Eye 7 By E. H. Chapin, Doing What We Can 29 By James Vila Blake. The Happy Life 61 By MiNOT J. Sayage. Novel-Keading 75 By W. L. Sheldok. The Sight of Natuee . 99 By Philip S. Thaoher. THE SEEING EYE. E. h: Chapin. I saw the beauty of the world Before me like a flag unfurled, The splendor of the morning sky And all the stars in company : I thought, How beautiful it is ! — My soul said, There is more than this. Sometimes I have an awful thought That bids me do the thing I ought : It comes like wind, it burns like flame, — How shall I give that thought a name ? It draws me like a loving kiss : My soul says, There is more than this. I dreamed an angel of the Lord, With purple wings and golden sword, And such a splendor in his face As made a glory in the place : I thought, How beautiful he is I My soul said, There is more than this. That angel's Lord I cannot see Or hear, but he is Lord to me ; And in the heavens and earth and skies, The good which lives till evil dies. The love which I can not withstand, God writes his name with his own hand. -— TT. jB. Bands. (6) THE SEEING EYE. "Air, — I want air, and sunshine, and blue sky. The feeling of the breeze upon my face. The feeling of the turf beneath my feet, And no walls but the far-off mountain-tops." — Longfellow, ** ' There's quiet in that angel's glance; There's rest in that still countenance.' *'*Be still, and know that I am God,' the Mighty Presence seems to say, voicing itself in surgings of the mountain pines, or in the cataract's thunder, or in the still small voice of birds, or in the silence of the night." — John W, Chadwick, '' Oh, glad am I that I was born I ^ For who is sad when flaming morn Bursts forth, or when the mighty night Carries the soul from height to height I ** To me, as to the child that sings, — The bird that claps his rain-washed wings, The breeze that curls the sun-tipt flower, — Comes some new joy with each new hour: 5 THE SEEING ETB. ** Joy in tlie beauty of the earth; Joy in the fire upon the hearth; Joy in the potency of love In which I live and breathe and move; ** Joy even in the shapeless thought That, some day, when all tasks are wrought, I shall explore the vasty deep Beyond the frozen gates of sleep." — Harriet Prescott Spofford. THE grandest revelations of life and nature are infolded in the most familiar facts. He who has found no lofty suggestion in traversing the entire firmament may yet gain something in studying that wonderful instru- ment of sight, the human eye. Consider what instances of skill we gaze at with admiration, and cross oceans to behold, and yet how im- perfect and clumsy they are compared with this little compact organ set in its bony cup, with its lenses and regulators and pulleys and screws, its curtaining iris and its crystal deep, its inner chamber of imagery on which are flung the pictures of the universe, — the aspects of nature, the shapes of art, the symbols of knowledge, the faces of love ; this magic glass, both telescope and microscope, filled with the THE SEEING EYE. 9 splendors of an insect's wing, yet taking in the scenery of heaven; this sentinel of the passions; this signal of the conscious soul, kindled by a light within more glorious than the light without, and never satisfied with seeing. Such is the human eye. And from the lowest creatures, whose visual apparatus is a mere nervous speck, up to thle most complex organ- isms, there is nothing that has the range of this organ. In certain specialties of vision man may not be equal to some animals or insects. The shark and the spider, the hawk and the cat, may see better on some particular plane of sight ; but in that general power which far transcends any special capacity, in scope, in possibility, in educated faculty, in expressive- ness, the human eye excels all others. If, then, superior qualifications are to be taken as proof of superior purpose, this fact of itself is significant as to the dignity and the destiny of man. We need no better refuta- tion of sceptical theories, no other attestation of sublime hopes, than this crystal globe of vision, — the astronomer's eye, for instance, wandering over the remotest fields of light; 10 THE SEEING EYE. the artist's eye, catching the subtle beauty of nature ; the eye of love and devotion, recogniz- ing the presence and the touch of the all- pervading spirit. But in this line of argument nothing seems more suggestive than the statement in Ecclesi- astes, "The eye is not satisfied with seeing/' Now, so far as we can judge, the merely animal eye is satisfied with seeing. The brute does not shift about to get better views of nature. He does not search the landscape for objects of beauty and sublimity. The ox grazes con- tentedly in his pasture, and seeks nothing beyond the promise of his food. In darkness, says the Psalmist, "all the beasts of the forest do creep forth," roaring " after their prey,'' and "seeking their meat from God." But when "the sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens." It is man only who " goes forth unto his work and to his labor until the evening." It is man only who finds in the opportunities of vision the inspira- tion of action, and in all that lies under the sun secures employment for a restless curiosity. He ponders unfathomable problems in the pebble and the weed, and eagerly searches the THE SEEING EYE. H secrets of the universe. How much, of human enterprise is simply the result of a longing for vision, — the desire to see strange lands and look upon memorable faces, to watch the evolu- tion of facts, and detect hidden causes ! No man is satisfied with that which he sees right around him. The child longs to know what lies beyond the hills that bound his familiar valley, into what strange country the sun goes down, and upon what marvelous region the rainbow rests. The schoolboy quits playing with the pebbles and the surf, to wonder about other shores across the wide, gray sea, and gazes wist- fully at the gilded sails away out on the horizon. And here, as in other things, "The child is father to the man.'^ Ever straining beyond the visible limit, ever exploring some depth or height, "the eye is not satisfied with seeing.'^ In the healthy working of the faculties, it is never weary of the opening day, never indiffer- ent to the promise of something new. Doubt- less there are nobler motives than curiosity leading men to the ends of the earth. But how much heroism and achievement does that single passion of curiosity itself inspire ! In its grat- ification, over what a grand scale of diversities, 12 THE SEEING EYE. making up the world-wide harmony, does the eye of man sweep, until the earth lies unrolled in the traveler's memory, like a sheet of choral music. From the West to the East, whatever the sun reveals as it flashes upon the rim of the wheeling earth ; from the South to the North, where the sun burns above the horizon for one long summer's day, where it hides in the dark- ness of polar night; wherever the white wake of ships encircles the globe like a chain ; wherever man's foot may cling or his hand may hold, from the depths of primeval darkness and the heat of central fire, away above the path of the eagle, where the voice grows faint in the thin upper air, — so does the grand panorama unroll itself before the unsatisfied eye, — tracts of brown desert and intervals of rolling green, snow- capped mountains at whose feet lie billows of yellow corn and purple grapes, clots of teeming cities as motley as their men, spots of unpro- faned grandeur almost holy in their solitude, — the poles and antipodes, the burning cone of Cotopaxi and the monotony of Arabian sands. The eye, however, is not satisfied with its own natural limits, but seeks the aid of instru- ments. As, in its aspects, it is the most striking THE SEEING EYE. 13 of all the organs of sense, so does it transcend them all in its scope, both of space and time. This little orb of observation, turning on its minute axis, sweeps the splendid theatre of suns and systems, comprehending millions of miles in a glance, and is visited by rays of light that have been traveling downwards for thousands of years. There is a suggestive fact here involved, which, when we duly consider it, comes to us with quickening force, — the fact that this in- satiable curiosity is characteristic of man alone, and that so much of his time and his effort should be devoted to the mere purpose of seeing. Whether the upshot be all vanity and vexation of spirit, or whether it lead to substantial results, the fact itself is none the less sug- gestive. What is it that is not satisfied with seeing ? In no scale of created being, — not even the lowest, — is it the eye itself that sees. It is the instinct, or consciousness , back of the eye. Examine the dead organ in man or animal, and all its wondrous mechanism is there. Lift the fallen lid, and the light of the outward world flickers upon its surface. But the faculty of 14 THE SEEIlSrG EYE. sight is not there. The power that, back of retina and optic nerve, and far within the mys- terious chamber of the brain, actually saw and apprehended the visible forms of things, — this has vanished. Whatever that faculty may be in the brute, we have seen that in man it is a peculiar and distinctive faculty. We have seen that to him belongs this desire for vision, — this pushing inquisitiveness that is never satisfied. Such, then, must be the inner and conscious nature of man. Such must be the mysterious power behind the eye, — the thing that really sees. Therefore the eye that is not satisfied with seeing is the spirit within us. The outer organ is only its factor, or representative. The mind of man is the eye of man. And it is because of the limitless nature of the human soul that the eye of man never rests, but per- petually wanders over all the visible world, over all the regions of possible truth and beauty. Surely, if this were merely a mortal and limited nature, this would not be. Man would be satis- fied with seeing, even as the brute, adjusted to his only sphere, is satisfied with seeing ; and he would be content with the scope of the visible and the present. The fact that he is not thus THE SEEING EYE. 15 content suggests that for him there is something more than the visible and the present, — a higher than any mere earthly destiny, — a nobler than any mere animal function. Consider what it is that the physical eye itself implies, I would not urge any presumptuous theory of final causes. I would not attempt to decide what any one thing is absolutely made for, nor overlook its relations to all other things as part of a grand and complex whole. But an examination of this mechanism alone — these cups, these tissues, these muscles, these elastic veils — shows at least that the eye is adjusted to the conditions of the external world, and that there are external things for it to behold. So much, I repeat, the physical eye implies. But, this being so, I ask. What is implied by that consciousness which acts behind the physical organ, — that faculty which really sees, and is never satisfied ? I have said that the Tnind of man is the eye of man ; and I ask. What does that restless mind itself, with its capacities and instincts, imply? Surely it implies the exist- ence of objects fitted to those capacities and instincts, — the existence of unlimited truth and beauty and goodness, and a field of deathless 16 THE SEEIIfG ETE. activity for that faculty which is never satisfied. In this peculiarity of man, — in this mounting restlessness and boundless desire, — I trace a power which, though it may often be prompted by a vain curiosity, and seek trivial gratifica- tions, nevertheless bea.rs the stamp of an irre- pressible quality and endless life. For now that we have arrived at the fact that it is really the mind that sees, — the mind itself that is the unsatisfied eye, — we find that not only is it unsatisfied with any limit to its material vision, but it is not satisfied with the mere forms of things. Back of iris and retina there are other lenses. There is a lens of instinct, a lens of reason, a lens of faith, through which come reflections far beyond the visible veil of earth and heaven, images of ideal majesty and loveliness, and ''A light that never was on sea or land." Are these mere fantasies engendered from within? If so, I ask. What do these interior lenses imply ? And why do they exist at all ? In the dead organ^, even as it lies useless in the socket, we find demonstration of a visual purpose. We infer real objects without, to THE SEEI]>fG EYE. 17 which it was made to correspond, or, at least, to which it has been adjusted. What, then, must we infer from this mechanism of spiritual con- sciousness, — the faculty that really sees, — when we find it adapted to spiritual realities ? What can we infer, but that in the wide realm of actual being there are spiritual objects which answer to its function ? For the mind, and not the body, being the real eye, the faculty of looking out upon material forms is only one of its functions. This faith-vision, this preception of reason, is just as truly an original faculty, although now its objects may be seen only as "through a glass darbly.^^ In fact, with the physical eye we never do see things, — only the reflection of things. You never really saw the most familiar object. You never gazed upon your mother's face, or the expression of your child. We have only portraits of the dearest frieiids hung in the marvelous gallery of the eye. Yet we do not distrust these transmitted images. We live in their light, and rejoice in their communion. Why, then, distrust these other conceptions, though they are but images also, and we may behold them only in that transparent world where the material lens shall 18 THE SEEIIS^G EYE. be shattered, and we shall see as we never do here, — " face to face " ? "Why suppose these to be fantasies, any more than the mountains, the stars, the cataract with its awful beauty, the familiar form, the dear countenance with its enduring look of love? This apprehension of God as an inscrutable Essence, yet also a veri- table Presence ; this impression on the retina of the soul of those who have vanished from our material sight, but who still look upon us across the river of death; this picture-gallery of beloved ones, that enriches the chambers of the humblest mind, — are these but mists of fancy, or dreams of mortal sleep? I answer that they are as legitimate as any transcript of the outward world, only more indefinite, as all facts involved with the infinite and the immortal necessarily must be. They are revealed to the same eye as that which sees through the physical organ; their outlines lie as steadily and as undeniably upon its retina as do the outlines of material things. There are diseased eyes, and there are defective eyes, by which the optic nerve brings false reports, upon which the outward world looks grim and obscure, to which all external things are a blank. So, too, there may be THE SEEING EYE. 19 diseased and defective souls, whose images of spiritual things are fantastic and exaggerated, or whose vision is sealed altogether by sad, interior blindness. But these do not impeach the legitimate function of the eye, nor refute the general convictions of men. And these conceptions of God and immortality do not belong to the category of personal conceits. In one form or another their outlines stand pictured on the common soul of man, — the soul of the child, the savage, the saint, the philosopher. This is not a fanciful analogy, — a play upon words. It is an argument. I maintain that these other lenses of the mind — which is the faculty that really sees — imply corresponding objects as veritably as the mechanism of the physical eye implies corresponding objects. I maintain that these images that hang upon the retina of the soul are as surely the reflections of realities as those which linger on the tissues of the material organ ; in fine, that as the mind is not satisfied with seeing the mere material form of things, but seeks and discerns something behind and above them all, it follows that such a transcendent region actually exists. Moreover, as this faculty of vision that permits 20 THE SEEING EYE. no limit to its material discoveries, and looks beyond these sensuous veils, is never satisfied with seeing, I ask. What does this fact itself imply? Surely it suggests boundless oppor- tunities of action. The desire to see is never quenched : nevertheless the mere physical organ of sight grows weary, and gladly retreats under its drowsy lids. The dew of sleep is required for its refreshment, and the periods of darkness indicate a necessary suspension of its work. Age draws over it a filmy curtain. " They that look out of the windows are darkened,'' says the author of Ecclesiastes, describing in an impres- sive figure that season when man's citizenship in this lower world draws to a close, and he is to be released from his labor among visible things. And so comes Death, shutting up the worn-out casements, and bringing on the final night when all this curious mechanism is re- solved into its elements. But the actual eye is not yet satisfied with seeing, and the forces that shatter its material instruments do not quench its capacity or its yearning. But no capacity is without its sphere, no instinct is forever balked. The unsatisfied eye demonstrates the deathless and ever-unfolding mind. THE SEEIISTG EYE. 21 An important point is here to be considered. I have illustrated a general condition of human- ity. No man is satisfied with seeing. All men manifest this unlimited desire. But certainly all men do not manifest this in the same degree. With some it is faint and fitful. Therefore, in perfect consistency with what has been said, I also urge this truth, — that the eye sees more and more, and more and more shows its capacity for seeing, in proportion as it becomes accus- tomed to worthy objects. There may be diver- sities of spiritual, as there are diversities of physical faculty. Consider what some men will train their natural eyes to behold, — the sailor at the mast-head, the Indian in the woods, the Esquimaux among the snows. The visual faculty of every man may not be capable of such refinement, and yet the eye of any man may be trained to greater skill. And so there are diversities of spiritual sight, some of them perhaps resulting from original differences in power. But the spiritual vision of any man may be educated to still better results. Some men hardly see anything with the interior eye, or, rather, with the interior lens of the eye, which is the mind. Living among scenes of 22 THE SEEING EYE. wonder and of beauty, — among the ancient miracles of nature, — to such, a man there is nothing but common earth and sky, — a barom- eter for the weather, or a field for crops. *'A primrose by the river's brim A yellow primrose is to him, And it is nothing more." But to the eyes of some other it is much more, and everything exhibits something else than its material expression or worldly use. Each opening morning comes like new-born life, ^^ trailing glory'' from the Creator's hand. One reason why men have not this spiritual discern- ment is because they will not see, because they neglect the faculty of seeing. It has been truly said that " the eye sees only that which it brings the power to see." It does not create the thing to be seen, any more than the microscope creates the pomp of an insect's wing, or Eosse's tube the splendors of Orion. But we see just what we exercise the power to see ; and no external revelations, however urged upon us, will make up for the lack of spiritual refinement. If you would see more things and better things, educate the eye. Educate the physical eye if you would THE SEEING EYE. 23 see more of the natural world. But, even then, the mind must be educated, if we would discern the glory and the beauty everywhere, and live in a world of perpetual delight, detecting a rarer loveliness in the daisy, and pictures of wondrous grandeur in the shadows that drift along the mountain. It is not merely far trav- eling that enlarges and enriches the vision. Humboldt may have seen no more than a thousand other men who have been roving over the earth; but he saw better. The observant philosopher discovers a world of wonders in ^^ a tour around his garden.^^ All this tends to the point, that the eye of the soul be educated, — the interior faculty which in reality does all the seeing. Let the eye of the soul be educated if you would see the world in new relations, if you would detect the true significance of life, if you would discern the real blessedness of every joy and the right look of every affliction, if you would stand consciously in the presence of God, and gaze upon spiritual things. Then you will see these realities where they are, nor wait for the opening of the crystal gates to discern what mere material vision can never behold. 24 THE SEEING EYE. It is an old truth, but as true as it is old, that "none are so blind as those who won't see/' What we really need is not more things, but better eyesight. And is it not this eye of the soul that we must mainly rely upon ? How far will physical sight guide us ? How long will it last us ? How much will it enable us to see ? At best it gives us only appearances, and itself fades and grows dim ere long. Think, then, of the desolation of those who have no interior vision. How light, comparatively, has been the affliction of physical blindness to men like Niebuhr, who, when the veil had fallen upon present things, could cheer the darkness of his closing years by retracing in the luminous track of memory the scenes of early travel; or to Milton, who, "with that inner eye which no calamity could darken," saw "those ethereal virtues flinging down on the jasper pavement their crowns of amaranth and gold.'' But "if the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness ! " In fact, a man's spiritual state may be tested by what he sees, by the way in which the world, and the things that are in the world, look to him. Men saw no comeliness in Jesus: they discerned not the aspect of THE SEEING EYE. 25 divine truth, because they themselves "were not of the truth/^ Pray, then, for light, as of old those blind men by the wayside prayed, "Lord, that our eyes may be opened!^' We are in this world to see. Glorious are the revelations of material things to the material eye; but far more glorious are the revelations made to the eye within. And yet, within the limitations of our present state, even these are not enough for us. Is it not a very suggestive fact? Trained to discern all this excellence, the eye is not satisfied with seeing. It is meant that it never shall be satisfied, here and now. The eye, by this very communion with spiritual objects, is educated to a larger capacity and a nobler desire ; and so passes onward, unsatisfied still, beyond the veil, to see more and more of the perfection of God, but, never satisfied with seeing, to push its perception still onward and upward, while the point of present attainment will ever be the signal of new possibility and perpetual aspiration. '*Kothmg resting in its own completeness Can have worth or beauty: but alone Because it leads and tends to farther sweetness, Fuller, higher, deeper than its own. 26 THE SEEING EYE. ** Spring's real glory dwells not in the meaning, Gracious though it be, of her blue hours ; But is hidden in her tender leaning To the Summer's richer wealth of flowers. "Dawn is fair, because the mists fade slowly Into Day, which floods the world with light; Twilight's mystery is sweet and holy Just because it ends in starry Night. ** Childhood's smiles unconscious graces borrow From Strife that in a far-off future lies ; And angel-glances, veiled now by life's sorrow, Draw our hearts to some beloved eyes. " Life is only bright when it proceedeth Toward a truer, deeper life above ; Human love is sweetest when it leadeth To a more divine and perfect love. ' * Dare not to blame earth' s gifts for incompleteness ; In that want their beauty lies : they roll Towards some inflnite depth of love and sweetness, Bearing onward man's reluctant soul." DOING WHAT WE CAN. BY / Jambs Vila Blakb. We fare on earth as other men have fared. Were they successful ? — let us not despair. Was disappointment oft their sole reward ? Yet shall their tale instruct, if it declare How they have borne the load ourselves are doomed to bear. — James Beattie, Then said his Lordship, ''Well, God mend all!" "Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend it," said the other. — Quoted by Carlyle, Kouse to some high and holy work of love, And thou an angel's happiness shalt know; The good begun by thee while here below Shall like a river run, and broader flow." — Anon. I can believe, it shall you grieve, And somewhat you distrain, But afterward, your sufferance hard, Within a day or twain, Shall soon aslake ; and ye shall take Comfort to you again. — Old English Ballad, (28) DOING WHAT WE CAN. 'T^HEKE is a Bible phrase which, says, ^^Be ^ perfected.^^ The Greek word so translated means to make ready, to put fully in order, to complete ; primarily of things broken or injured, meaning to mend; then of persons in error, meaning to restore, to set right, to bring to that proper state which one should be in. The phrase signifies, plainly, to be brought from an erring or imperfect to a restored or completed or per- fected state. To be perfected, in the sense here understood, is to come from the imperfect to or towards the perfect ; from a low place to a high one. It is a restoring, or leading out, of what has a better aim or nature than now it shows, having gone wrong. Let us not be hopeless or too much cast 30 DOING WHAT WE CAN. down then, or, least of all, beaten and bruised out of all effort, if we begin low or have done ill ; for it is to us very ones that it is written. Be perfected! — that is, be restored, or led on- ward, to what you by nature are like, and become your own true selves. This is different from the doctrine of '' regen- eration'^ as usually taught; which is that by nature we are bad and must be rectified by a triumph over nature, a revolution in us, whereby we become different from our human constitution and opposite to it. But rather, to ^^be perfected" means, in the phrase we are considering, to be restored, or completed. That is, if restored, re- paired, mended, then brought to our unbroken and proper natural state, from which we have retrograded ; and if completed, then made to go on from a low estate to a higher condition which is the true and natural issue ^nd eventuation of us. But it may be said. We are bidden to be per- fect: is this not a terrible command ? No; but easy and natural. For it means to restore, to complete; which is simply to build us up to our natural stature: which surely must mean DOING WHAT WE CAN. 31 something that no one will find impossible or terrible. Moreover, since it is our natural stature and belongs to us in the unity of things, all things will help us. We shall be moving in harmony with all. This is a very great point; for the moment a man shoulders an evil thing and under- takes to carry it, every thing is in his way and rubs against his load and pushes it this way and that, so that hardly he can stagger along under it at all; and assuredly sometime it will be struck or torn from him and thrown down. But if he be carrying a good thing, it is conformable to every thing he meets and to every force of Nature that he shall carry it. Nothing can be opposed to it except bad or mistaken men ; and certainly all Nature and all other men will be too much for the evil or the folly of the few bad men. What would you wish to have set forth as a command to us ? Any thing less than what our nature should revere and desire ? And should this be aught less than the perfect ? Thus "Be perfected ^^ is no terrible or burden- some command ; because it is of the essence of our worship. Blessed is it ! Our very substance 32 DOING WHAT WE CAN. is that we can adore perf ectness, and only that. All Nature moves thereto, and only thereto. During all the aeons of the patience of God in creation, the earth has been moving thus, with all that has come to life on it. And the end and enthusiasm and adoration of each creature can be only the end and tendency of all Nature, namely, the Perfect. Therefore the command no more than recognizes the element and nature of worship in us, and ordains that we can set nothing before us less high than the holiness that is adorable and the truth that is supreme. Again, — consider : If a man be mending or restoring himself, or completing himself, he then is doing a perfecting thing, and indeed a thing perfect in itself. For, can a man do anything more perfect than to be in the process of mend- ing himself, or completing himself ?^ To be doing this, then, is itself a perfectness and an obedience to the command. This is growth! And to grow is to be perfect already in a most great and noble way ; for it is doing a perfect act and keeping up a perfect way and motion. But this growth of us can not be done without effort. " The whole creation travaileth together ^^ DOING WHAT WE CAN. 83 in the march of it. No great thing comes but by reason of a conception greater still, and a struggle along the way unto it. The effort of growing must have three great qualities or virtues : It must be earnest ; that is, strong in purpose and desire. It must be thoughtful ; that is, full of reason and inward argument how the growth is to be attained and what manner of endeavor is needful. It must be steady ; that is, forceful and forward, full of will, not fitful or by drift or impulse at this moment or another, and sometimes backward, but with one motion to the end. And now what have we in these three virtues of earnestness, thoughtf ulness, and steadiness ? What but emotion, reason, and will ! — the whole being of us. How great a perfection, then, is growing ! But again, consider that, if we do what we can, and all we can, we do perfectly, and have become perfected therein. And he who does all he can is perfect. Is he not, at that moment, complete for that instant ? Hath he not reached his limit at that time ? Hath he not finished himself at that hour and for that space and 34 DOING WHAT WE CAJST. place where he is ? For if he hare done all he can, what else is left ? He is at the perfection of himself at that time. I can show this by a pleasant and shrewd story : A poor man stood near a vaunting and boasting musician who was proclaiming his fine playing. The poor man said, quietly, ^^I can equal you, friend/^ Great was the scorn of the musician and the amusement of the bystanders. "Very well, let us match ourselves in a trial,'^ said the poor man. The musician then played superbly, and the poor man followed very simply and decently, but no whit in parity with the artist; yet when he had done, he said, " I have equaled you, friend.^' "What! do you say your per- formance was equal to mine?^^ "No, indeed; that is another thing: I said naught of your jperformance or mine. I said but that / would equal you, — not your playing but yourself. And I have kept my word, for I did my best ; and you could do no more than do your best. So that we were just equal as men, though our performance was different. Was there the breadth of a hair between your virtue and mine in it? This should teach you, friend, not to DOIISra WHAT WE CAN. 35 boast, and not to look scornfully or slightingly on others; for with all your skill you can be nothing more excellent than any man who will do his best/' This doctrine of perfectness, that it is great perfectness to do what we can, hath a place in pure morals as well as in arts and industries; ay, and its very best place, by as much as high morality is better than to excel in any art. Morality hath indeed a very special relation to the perfectness of doing what we can, a relation altogether its own, by reason of the commanding nature of morality, which the poet calls *' Stern daughter of the voice of God." This we shall understand if we look at it a little closely and under two heads : First, what if we judge ill and mistake the nature of things, deeming something to be good and right which in truth is wrong and harmful ? Or what if we be perplexed and cannot decide between two judgments or actions, not seeing clearly what is the good and right way under all the conditions ? Well, if we have judged ill, but did what we could to judge well, we shall be at peace ; indeed, at such great peace that wo 36 DOIISTG WHAT WE CAN. shall be able to bear quietly the effects of our error and ignorance. This peace, whether we shall have it, will depend on how we can answer two questions which will press home unto us, namely. Did we do what we could to learn and judge well ? and, With what manner of motive did we act ? Were we single-eyed ? Did we wish with perfect sincerity to know the good and right way, or were we confused with other motives which beat up about us the dust of a conflict of selfish interests and desires ? For it is wonderful and glorious what power we have to see the truth when the truth is all we wish to see. But there is a second case : What if we fail to do the right, while knowing the right clearly ? Ah! this is the one inalienable grief and pain and shame. For then we have not the support of having done what we could. In this pure moral sphere, when the right way clearly is seen, and the proof is this, that ^tis acknowl- edged in our better and higher hours, we always feel — and ^tis not to be escaped however we argue, dally, or plead for ourselves — that we need not have failed. ISTothing compelled us. 'Tis the very office and nature of morality that DOING WHAT WE CAN. 37 it insists^ and will hear no nay, that always we can do what toe ought to do. " But, what ! " say you. ^^Are there not hard conditions ? Are not some souls born in bad places and with untoward bodies full of fevers? Can the ill-taught or the ill-made do as well as the instructed or the happily-formed?^^ No. But each one can do what he knows. He can equal his knowledge in his act. Nothing is more certain than this, and the mind will not let it go. But in those failures wherein we know a better way and do a worse way, are we all com- fortless ? No. We are ashamed before our own eyes, but we are not to despise ourselves as castaways. To fall is not to be a ruin. ^Tis only that which stays fallen that is a ruin. Hereto applies well the good and sturdy proverb, "He who gets up every time he falls, sometime will get up to remain standing.^^ To be ashamed is right, but to despair is wrong. To condemn myself is a strength, because it is to say, " I can do what I ought and what I know I ought ^^; but utterly to despise myself is a weakness, for no one is to be abhorred or to raise a mere disgust but one who so monstrously is composed that he is able to know what is right but can not do it. 38 DOING WHAT WE CAN. Therefore, let me take cheer, and buckle myself again ; and if I fall, be ashamed and feel how mean is such an overthrow, and say, " Lo ! how little a thing prevailed over me ! ''—like a knight smarting with being beaten by a foe smaller than himself. This certainly will be the doing of one thing which always we can do, namely, to keep to the image of what is heavenly, ideal, beauti- ful, and to love it, and to give ear to no excuses, but to blame ourselves if we desert it, and to run into a cave of shame till we can come forth better resolved to strive again in the light. As some are spread around with bitter condi- tions, and confused with direful passions, which make lovely conduct a hard attainment, so again others are penned in bare corners, and heaped up with petty cares and small business^ which seem at first no ground for beautiful or heroic life to grow in — hemmed in with common labors, few and small opportunities, lowly stations, cramped room, little means, uninfluential company. And with these limitations there may be great thirst of mind and heart, longings, aspirations, ambi- tions, — very likely noble ambitions. It is by no means an easy and glad thing to be crowded by conditions into lonely, obscure corners of DOING WHAT WE CAN. 39 unrecompensed, unloved and uncheered labors. This is a heavy bnrden to carry even a little while ; and for life, as some do, very heavy. The heart is worn and bowed down. What is the remedy ? To reflect on the nature of perf ectness, that it is to do all we can. One may do anything in such a way that it is only a thing done, or one may do it in such a manner that it is a deed. What odds what the work may be? The question is, What is the spirit and manner of the doing of it ? Bryant says this of one of the bits of life's business which all must do, of whatever estate or place, namely, dying: " Go not, like the quarry slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon." 'Tis a curious thought that all are equal anyway in their manner of being born, for no one hath any will or behavior in that ; and then, after a life-span of vast differences, powers, pleasures, privileges, estates, fortunes, all are just alike again in power to die with dignity and do a deed therein ; and the richest in place, power or pros- perity can transact the business of dying no more worthily of it, nor with more proper adornment, 40 DOING WHAT WE CAK. than the most lowly and obscure. But what event of life is there, or what daily business, that stands not so ? 'Tis possible to give a penny more finely and magnificently than a dollar or ten thousand dollars. In whatever may be done a man may be a yokel, a slave, a skulker whipped to his place, a beast of burden goaded under his pack, or he may be manful and knightly, so that he makes a small thing as much of a deed as any one can make a large thing. If any work be finer or nobler in itself, yet the deed of doing the lower labor may be as great as the deed of doing the higher. If one simply stand to his post manfully, that is a deed equal to the stand- ing manfully to any other post. Therefore, though God giveth to us very different occasions and places, he giveth to every one the same scope to do deeds in his own place. What hath one, then, more than another-? Nothing, in the great- est point ; therefore little altogether. The question is this : Do we wish the praise of God or of men ? Do we long for some fine appearance amid circumstances, or to be with reality, at the heart of l^ature ! If the latter, we have only to do all we can where we are and in what circumstances we are 5 adding this, that DOING WHAT WE CAIST. 41 always a part of what we can do is to keep dig- nity and a sweet devotion or rank, and serene consciousness of our high place amid the real, by means of quiet content and simple uncom- plainingness, — not being restless or envious, or either looking too much up at others or down on ourselves, but calmly and piously and willingly looking around us on the level of the virtue of doing what we can. To be ambitious of great works is to apply for men's admiration; but to be ambitious or aspiring to do simply all we can, and have a pure peace therein, that is to be co-workers with the divine. I can not write these simple thoughts with- out a visitation in mind of Captain Jackson in Charles Lamb's fine picture of him — " a retired half-pay officer, with a wife and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the port and notions of gentlewomen on that slender pro- fessional allowance/' He had the " noble tone of hospitality when first you set foot in the cottage — anxious ministerings about you where little or nothing (God knows) was to be min- istered — Althea's horn in a poor platter, the 42 DOIISTG WHAT WE CAK. power of self-encliantment by which in his mag- nificent wishes to entertain you he multiplied his means to bounties. You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag, cold savings from the foregone meal, remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. But in the copious will, the reveling imagination of your host — ^the mind, the mind, Master Shallow ^ — whole beeves were spread before you — hecatombs — no end ap- peared to the profusion. It was the widow's cruse, the loaves and fishes : carving could not lessen nor helping diminish it — the stamina were left — the elemental bone still flourished divested of its accidents. . . . Eich men direct you to their furniture, poor ones divert you from it. He neither 'did one nor the other, but, by simply assuming that every thing was handsome about him, you were positively at a demur what you did or did not see at the cottage. With nothing to live on, he seemed to live on every thing. He had a stock of wealth in his mind ; not that which is properly termed content, for in truth he was not to be contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force'' of himself. DOIKG WHAT WE CAN. 43 What a gracious portrait ! How it doth honor life, and the soul in life, and mankind, and Providence! To do what we can hath a fine name. It is, " The habit of excellence/^ Once I was asked by a wise man about a young girl. I answered, "I know little of her — hardly more than this, that she makes delicious bread." "That is enough/^ said my friend; "the point is to have established ' the habit of excel- lence.^ " This was a wise saying, both as to the virtue of the " habit " and as to the results of it. For this kind of perf ectness, that we do what we can, is so great that it brings another perfectness, nay, it drags it along behind and compels it to enter our doors and bless us — I mean an actual beauty and fine quality in the thing done, and the bringing of something to pass excellently, which follows on our doing what we can of it constantly and faithfully. Let any one read at his best to-day, or play on viol or flute, or sing, or work at bench in wood or metal, or compose music or poesy, or arrange and decorate the home, or cook for table, or nurse the sick, or till 44 DOING WHAT WE CAN. a garden of flowers, or do what thing he will, if he do fully what he can of it, then to-morrow he will be able to do it a little better. Nay, if even he practise the action in his mind, reflecting on it, so that, after having done what he can of it, he go on with a mental study of it, doing it over again in thought with care and attention, he will prevail more in it the next time he essays it — handling the viol or flute more musically, singing more beautifully, making a finer thing with tools, or attaining a better poem; and so with all things. Doth not this show plainly how great a perfectness it is to do what we can, since it brings trooping behind it all other kinds of excellence, and makes perfectness to abide with us in actual things to be seen and heard and touched, agreeing together in forms that are great beauty? How immediate is the effect and impressive- ness of any thing that hath attained perfectness of its kind, or that so hath aimed at it and labored toward it that it seems to have come to it! In that great book of Eush, "On the Voice," — wonderfully great, — the author speaks of the power of those mighty examples of vocal DOING WHAT WE CAIST. 45 perfection which " sound along the highways of the world/' the great singers, — their power to ^^ quell the pride of rank by its momentary sensa- tion of envy.'' It is a great means whereby God bends the necks of the stubborn and calls a haughty carriage to a halt. I protest that never yet I saw tumblers, acrobats and athletes at their feats but I forgot the spangles and sawdust, and, for the space of my entrancement before the perfect, envied them, or wished I could do such things, and thought it better to be they in those perfections than myself in my pen-work which creeps along so far from the shining perfectness that is imaginable therein. And before any fine mechanical production, a perfectness of hand- work, always I feel myself in a certain very great presence. I took once to a mechanic a bit of furniture to be repaired. It had not been misused, but had broken under the service it was made for. The man mended it, but soon it broke again in the same place. I took it then to a carpenter whose work I had had some occasion to admire. " There," said he, when he handed it back to me, ''ii it ever break again I will make you another one without charge." ^^You mean," said I, ^^ unless it shall last reason- 46 DOING WHAT WE CAN ably well." "No," said he, "I mean if it ever break, your life long." And he spake well, for here is the wooden article still in my house, used continually these many years, and showing no more signs of " giving " than a hill of stone. I felt a kind of radiance glow round me when that mechanic said, " If it ever break ! " There seemed a transcendence in that spot, and presence of divinity. — ^'Seemed, friend ? Nay, it was ; I know not ' seemed ' ! " One other thought; It is a part of doing all we can, and the best we can, to be able to per- ceive good things, good works, and to admire them generously; and especially to be more alive to the beauties than to the blemishes of any work ; and, most of all, to be full of a fine, rich, loyal, just and noble sense of the virtue of one who honestly and in a due place, and mod- estly, is doing what he can. For no one is yet ready to come to any very high work who hath not done what he can, and who is not humbly striving to do it, with what he has most in hand, namely, himself; so that critics have averred, and justly, that there is no preparation for works of art that can replace an exalted and DOING WHAT WE CAN, 47 honorable and ideal-loving soul, but that this is worth all schools and is the better part of all genius, on which both schools and genius must be builded. Wherefore, there is no part of our doing what we can with our circumstances which can help us so much to high work as what we do on our own minds and hearts, to bring them to a complete and right way. And the honesty, simplicity, generosity, and pure love of beauty, which shine in a generous esteem of others' labors, and especially in a high valuation of one who hath the dignity of doing what he can in his station, — this is an excellence which must precede any fine and lovely labor. He who is envious, or enviously unadmiring, or coldly indifferent, or ungenerously belittling of others' work, or fastens more readily on blemishes than on beauties, or jeers or laughs rudely because he feels superior or because he has no sympathy, this man hath yet to come to any high poise and building of power in art or letters or in any great works ; or at least, if he be strong, still he will be far from the fine conditions of doing what he can in any art of beauty or work of elevation, because he yet is so far from doing what he can in himself and his private station. 48 DOING WHAT WE CAN. Meantime, how beautiful this idea of being perfected! How fair this equal kingdom for all ! How lovely it is that there is a temple of reason and a presence of God in which all the mighty works, all the triumphs, of men, count nothing compared with the simple dignity and pure beauty of doing what we can ! How fine to know this superior order of nobility ! Amid all the noises and acclamations of earth, all honors and glorifications of men, prides and distinctions, how heartening to see this equality before God which will reverse many things, and daily is doing so, in order to make first in men's eyes also what is first in God's ! How comfort- ing to think that the neglected, if they do what they can, and wait with piety, which is one of the things they can, are exceedingly dear to the heart of God, and that no work of man is more honorable and no archangel more glorious ! And how blissful, rich, full of onany colors like the sky under the sun, joyful and blessed, life looks to us, and fellow-creatures appear, when we attain to this manner of sight wherewith to look forth on them! THE HAPPY LIFE. MiNOT J. Savage. Life is a game the soul can play With fewer pieces than men say. Might one be healed from fevering thought, And only look, each night, On some plain work well-wrought; Or if a man as right and true might be As a flower or a tree ! I would give up all that the mind In the prim city's hoard can find — House with its scrap-art bedight, Straitened manners of the street, Smooth-voiced society — If so the swiftness of the wind Might pass into my feet; If so the sweetness of the wheat Into my soul might pass, And the clear courage of the grass ; If the lark caroled in my song; If one tithe of the faithfulness Of the bird-mother with her brood Into my selfish heart might press, And make me also instinct-good. — Edward Bowland Sill, THE HAPPY LIFE. THE important things of life are the common- place things. It is not the unusual, it is not the strange, it is not that which happens once a year or once a lifetime, upon which our welfare and happiness depend. The sunlight is very commonplace, the air is commonplace, the ocean, the mountains, the leaves of the trees in the Spring, the singing of birds, the brightness of the sky, the every-day facts of home, the love of friends, our books, our employments, our pleasures,— these are all commonplace. And yet these are the stuffs out of which are woven the webs of our lives. Since the beginning of human history, man has been lured onward by one grand purpose. One thing has fascinated him, one thing has been the object of his universal and eternal desire, one 62 THE HAPPY LIFE. thing has he sought ; and that is the common- place thing that we call happiness. Man's dream of the past has been of a Garden of Eden, a Paradise, the place where our first parents were perfectly happy. This was the essence of it all. As to where it was located, as to the kind of trees that grew in it, the fountains, the flowers, the fruits, the surroundings, — these are only the dressing to the picture. The one thing that the world has meant by Paradise is that it was a place of perfect joy and rest. Since that has been lost, since the dream has faded away, or since we no longer believe that it was ever pos- sessed except as a dream, still we are engaged in the same search. We are looking for Paradise, either to regain it, if we believe we had it once and have been deprived of it, or else to create it, if it has never existed. The one dream of the world is of a place of happiness, in this world or beyond. Heaven, — what is that ? We may picture it as a place, a city whose streets are gold, whose gates are pearl ; we may picture it as a garden, with the tree of knowledge, of hap- piness, growing upon the banks of the river of life ; but it is always a place where there shall be no more death, where sorrow and sighing shall THE HAPPY LIFE. 53 flee away, where there shall be no more pain, and where God shall wipe all tears from our eyes. It is a place of restful happiness. And it is the spur to all human endeavor. Or if we have given up the Eden behind us, and also the Eden before us, and if we believe to-day that mankind has its destinies linked simply to this old planet, — that there is nothing else for us to look for but man- kind's future, — still we feel ourselves impelled to pursue that course of conduct, to be governed by those principles of action, which we are led to believe will issue in a better future for the world. That is, more happiness. We are to con- duct ourselves in such a way that our descendants shall be free from the disabilities, the evils, under which we suffer. They shall no longer carry the burdens, the heart-aches, the ignorance and pain, that we have had to bear. Thus we attempt so to order our lives that they shall be a part of that music that shall issue in the gladness of the world. Whether we will or not, we cannot help seek- ing happiness. I have never yet seen a person who did not seek it. I cannot even imagine a human being sensitive to pleasure and pain who would not seek it. If one does not seek it con- 64 THE HAPPY LIFE. sciously for himself, he is seeking it for somebody else ; and, though he may not realize it, he is in that way finding his own pleasure, so that, con- sciously or not, he is being lured on by the beauty and fascination of this one universal object of human search. Consider for a moment. I say that we cannot help seeking happiness. No man ever lived, no man lives now, no man ever can live, who by any possibility of imagination can be conceived of as choosing something that on the whole he does not want. If there are two things, one of which he must take, and he does not want either of them really, he nevertheless must choose that which he wants more, or which is least disagree- able to him. Voluntary choice means that a man takes that which, considering what he is and the circumstances by which he is surrounded, he prefers among the different possible objects of his choice. A man, then, is under the eternal necessity of seeking happiness in some degree, under some name, or disguised as you will under some form. Herbert Spencer has made us famil- iar with the principle which is the essence and at the foundation of life ; and that is this, that sentient beings are always so constituted that THE HAPPY LIFE. 65 those things which conduce to the preservation and increase of life are the ones that in their search and attainment confer pleasure. He has made it plain that^ were it otherwise, the human race would soon become extinct and all sentient beings would die from off the face of the earth. If we preferred those things that are injurious to us, which are inimical to our health, to our longevity, it would only be a few years before we should be led on by our desires to the choosing of such things or the doing of such actions as would work out the entire extinction of the race. So that those things which are for the good of man on the whole and in the long run are the ones that are forever linked with the pursuit of happiness. It is a necessity of every sentient being. But there are two important points that we ought to note just here, two principles that we must never overlook, lest by a fatal error we fall into such a course of life as shall be injurious to others and ultimately destructive to ourselves. In the first place, we are to remember that you and I have no right to seek our personal happi- ness, our personal gratification and pleasure, at the expense of the happiness, gratification, and Ob THE HAPPY LIFE. welfare of any otlier sentient being. For the happiness of my friend or of a stranger who occu- pies the same earth with me is just as sacred as my own; and, for the sake of acquiring any pleasure, or what seems to me my own good, I have no right to injure another. Then there is that other thing which has been demonstrated over and over again as the result of the world's experience : that he who seeks pleas- ure as the one first and always important object of his search is almost sure to miss that which he desires. In other words, it has been proved that the world's happiness, on the whole and in the long run, depends upon certain courses of con- duct which we have agreed to call just and right. So that he who forgets all about happiness, if he can do such a thing, — this upspringing desire at the centre of his life, this mainspring and motive of all activity, — he who forgets it and simply determines to follow the guiding star of duty, to be always just, always unselfish, to do always the right, he is taking the very straight- est possible road toward the highest degree and the largest amount of happiness both for himself and for all others concerned. This is what we mean, when we analyze it clearly, when we talk THE HAPPY LIFE. 67 about right^ about one tbing being rigbt and something else being wrong. It is as far as human experience has gone. We can go no deeper tban that. Those courses of conduct that we call right are what the world has found out, by long and bitter experience, to be conducive to human welfare and happiness ; and those things that we call wrong are the ones that hurt, that injure, that take away from the sum and depreciate the quality of the world's happiness. We have, then, no right to take our happiness at the expense of anybody else ; we have no right to make our personal gratification the dominant object of our endeavor, because in so doing we have found that we shall ultimately fail in our object, and also work injury to others, I now propose, first, to say a few things neg- atively, as to what does not make the happy life. The happy man is not always, not commonly, at any rate not necessarily, the rich man. Yet in this country there is no single thing that all men, women and children are so eager in the pursuit of as riches. We fancy, in spite of hu- man experience, and in spite of the lessons that observation is able to teach us, that^ if we could 68 THE HAPPY LIFE. only attain this, we should really grasp the secret of happiness. Yet you know perfectly well that nothing in the wide world is farther from the truth than that. I have seen some happy rich men. I have seen a great many happy men who were not rich. And it is my impression that, if I were seeking for the pre-eminently happy man to-day, I should not find him among those that we call wealthy. This is not at all strange. Wealth, honestly gained, intelligently and justly and humanely used, is an immense power for the elevation of the world, and, it seems to me, might be made a great power for the production of per- sonal happiness to the possessor 5 and yet it is only a means to an end, and most of the time, it seems to me, it is not used to that end. It is rather made an end in itself, that absorbs all the thought and power, the intelligence, genius and heart of man, so that he forgets what he is doing it all for, and simply finds himself absorbed year after year in doing it. The most of the rich men that I know are absorbed their whole lives long in getting rich. They dream that some time or other they will stop ; but I have found few who have done so. They simply keep on grinding, year after year, the same machine for the pro- THE HAPPY LIFE. 69 duction of more and more wealtli. If a boy be poor, and starts out with, a full determination to become rich, beyond and above everything else, the chances are that it will take all his time, all his genius, all his thought, and all his power. It will call for the exercise, the absorbing use, of every energy of his being. He will probably succeed; but, when he has succeeded, what then ? He has not had time to do anything else. He has had no time to train his brain in any other direction ; he has had no time to cultivate his affections, his love ; he has had no time to acquire knowledge or science, art, or any other thing of interest in the world. So that the chances are — I do not say that it is always true, but the chances are that, when he is rich, he has no time left for anything more. Is not this true ? Is it not the result of dispassionate observation of the world ? Wealth, then, is not essential to happiness. Power is not essential to happiness. It has passed into a proverb that " uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.'' Some of the unhappiest men of history have been those that held in their hands the sovereignty of the world. Take a man like Napoleon. Would he be your ideal of a happy man? The man who changed the civ- 60 THE HAPPY LIFE. ilization of the modern world, who made whole nations tremble with a glance of his eye, — was he a happy man ? Thousands of Erench peasants, in their blue blouses, weary with their day's work on their little patches of soil, have sat down under their vine-covered porches, in the soft air and beauty of the disappearing sunlight, while the bird of joy has sung its sweet song of simple, humble content in hearts happier a thousand times than a king. Intellectual greatness, authorship, fame, to be known and read all over the world, — this does not confer happiness necessarily. The intel- lectual giant of his age was Dean Swift ; but, if you wished to put your finger upon the most miserable man of his age you would probably select this same Dean Swift, a man who, seeking for petty place and power, had his heart eaten out with envy and jealousy and all conflicting passions, while he was easily intellectual monarch of his time. He found in this which was his own no happiness, while he made himself miserable in the search for those things which he never could attain. Social position does not necessarily confer hap- piness. If I wished to find the happiest woman THE HAPPY LIFE. 61 in Boston, Washington, or New York, I should not search for the social leader, for one who was at the summit of what is called society, for one who could dictate as to who should and who should not have entrance into the select circles of the city. You know too well what a dreary, empty sort of life this that we call fashionable generally is, how little real satisfaction is found in it, and how those who follow it, when they are through with the public display, go back to their homes with a sigh, thankful that the empty routine is done at last. In none of these conditions, then, will you find happiness. It is not these that constitute the happy man or that make the happy life. We talk sometimes about the injustice of God's government of the world, as though the average man and woman did not have a chance to gain the highest objects of human desire. In one sense, this is true. The government of this world is very unfair, if the real things that men and women need are wealth, power, intellectual great- ness, social station. If those are the things which constitute the only great absorbing objects of human search, then you can count on your fingers almost all the men and women in a generation 62 THE HAPPY LIFE. that have attained them : the rest of the world lives, suffers, smiles for a little while, and dies, — a failure. If that he true. But it is not true. The things you and I really need for happiness, the things that we need for satisfying these wants, are open and free, — free as the broad blue heaven, free as the stars at night, free as the air we breathe, free as the ocean outlook, free as the grasses of the field and the blossoms of June. What, then, are the essentials that make up the happy life ? I assume the possession of a fair degree of health and some of the comforts of life. But I do not know that I need to go so far as to assume even these. I believe one of the most important things to happiness is health; yet I have seen a great many people who did not possess health, who were a thousandfold happier than those who did. I believe that those things which we are accustomed to call comforts are very important to our happiness ; and yet I have known a great many people, who did not possess a fraction of what we regard as essential, who were a thousand times happier than those who do possess them. But I shall assume the possession of those, and speak briefly of three things that seem to me really essential to the happy life. THE HAPPY LIFE. 63 If you examine the structure of a human being, I mean not simply his physical, but his moral, intellectual, spiritual nature, you may easily sep- arate it into three great divisions. There are, in the first place, all those faculties that make him hunger for an active life; then there is that domain of his nature which is passional, affec- tional, which makes him desire some object on which to lavish his love ; and there is that other department that looks onward with aspiration, that we cover with the one word " hope,^^ which looks toward the future, which has an outlook, indefinite perhaps, but fixed, toward finer, sweet- er, better things than any we have attained in the past. I should say, then, that the three things essential to the happy life are these, — something to do, something to love, something to hope for. If you wish to find out who are the pessimists, the ones who are asking, like the writer of Eccle- siastes, whether life is worth living, you need not go to the man who has even a little garden patch, if he has something to interest him, to take up his time, something that he likes to do. You need not go to the farmer who has his own little estate from which he gains even a scanty subsistence, 64 THE HAPPY LIFE. who takes pride in his work, who loves to see his fields smoothly mown in the haying time, who takes personal satisfaction in having his rows of potatoes straight, in hoeing them as though engaged in a work of art, and, when he has fin- ished a row, leans on the handle of his hoe and looks over his work, and thinks he has done his best. You need not go to such a commonplace life as that to find one despairing about the world. You would go to the " clubs," to the men who have nothing to do, who have tasted everything, who have drained the cup of life to its dregs, and found nothing but dregs. These are the men who question about the future, or who do not care whether there is any future, who do not think that the game of life is worth the candle, or that the world is worth the trouble of starting it. You would go into fashionable society, to the young married or unmarried women who have nothing to do, who have no object, no purpose in life, who are not linked to any cause. The first essential to happiness, then, is something to do. If it is only a little, it is better than nothing ; but better far is it if it can be some great thing, something that touches the life, the wel- fare of humanity, some broad, general work that THE HAPPY LIFE. 66 links the little life to the great central life, so that one can say, and say it reverently, "God and I.'' Next, there must be something to love. We are fashioned in such a strange way that, on this affectional side of us, we are like the sun: the more it pours forth the wealth of its warmth and light, the brighter are its beams and the richer it still remains. So the more we pour out the wealth of our love and affection on the objects worthy of love, the more are we like a fountain that flows year after year, that has no bottom, because it springs from the eternal sources of the world, like a spring that has underground con- nection with the exhaustless sea. Human hearts demand something to love. They will fix upon some poor little pet, or some hobby, some slight, worthless thing, if they have no great thing offered to their choice ; and yet how grand it is when men have learned to love noble men, noble women, to love childhood, to love humanity, to love Nature, to love art, the wide world's beauty, and when they dare say, including all these in one word, — I love God, the eternal life, the ideal of all, that which is the heart and soul and main- spring of all ! 66 THE HAPPY LIFE. Next, something to hope for. The beauty of a journey over the world is not in what you can see this minute ; but it is the attitude of expectancy, the new views at every onward rush of the train. I remember that, when sailing up the Ehine, the most intensely interesting thing about it to me was the constant expectancy. I had read in story, travel, poetry, about the Ehine, and I knew what was coming, and was waiting ; and, as we turned this curve of the river, there appeared the spot where some historic deed was done ; this castle-crowned rock shadowed itself in the placid stream ; some new thing was seen at every turn. This attitude of expectancy, of onlooking, is the secret of hope ; and, if we can only have that deepest and grandest expectancy of all, that overleaps the accident of death, and feels sure that it is an accident, why, then trouble, sorrow, loss of friends, loss of property, sickness, are like the broken doll of the little child, over which she weeps her transient tears that will soon be dried. The tears of childhood have been com- pared to dew-drops shaken from fragrant flowers by the passing breeze that leaves no trace, but are ready to make rainbows with the sunshine that shall succeed. THE HAPPY LIFE. 67 These three things, then, are the essentials in the happiness of human life, — something to do, something to love, something to hope for. It seems to me, as I look over human society and study the kinds of life men lead, and as I study my own, — for I include myself in the same category,— that two-thirds of the sufferings and sorrows and miseries of life are utterly uncalled for; that we make ourselves sad, burden our hearts, and go through life with trouble, just because we are wilful and choose to do so, not because there is any necessity for it. Look at one of the things that destroys the happiness of many people, — the quality of envy, the unwillingness to be happy with what they possess because some one else has something that is better. Just think how mean as well as useless that is. Would you deprive other people of the happiness in the things that are theirs ? And who is wise enough to look into the heart and read the inner life of this person that you envy, so as to be quite sure that there is any rational ground for envy ? I see people with great pos- sessions, with beautiful houses finely furnished, with estates and grounds laid out with trees, artificial lakes and everything that landscape- 68 THE HAPPY LIFE. gardening can provide; and I sometimes wish. that I could possess such a place. But I never expect to, and do not feel at all certain that it would be best. Perhaps I would run the risk, if I had the opportunity ; and yet, as I look over such an estate, I think how much there is I can get out of it for which I do not have to pay. He who owns it has to pay for it, to hire men to keep it in order, to cut the lawns, to trim the trees, to care for the grounds. It is a perpetual care and expense to him. But I can look at it, and enjoy the beauty, and rejoice in it all, and it is all free to me. Yet I see thousands of people, who might take these things without money and without price, whose hearts are eaten out with a bitter envy, with a desire for personal possession, and who refuse to take advantage of it all because they do not carry the title-deeds for it in their pockets. There is also that general discontent with life that does not envy others so much as it refuses to be satisfied with what it possesses, because it does not possess something else. If we would remember the lesson of the old fable, a lesson which has come down from the pagan world, it might help us in this matter. THE HAPPY LIFE. 69 Jupiter, weary of the world's complainings, once told the inhabitants of a certain district that they were at liberty to come together and throw down all the burdens they had been carry- ing, of which they were tired, and pick out of the gathered heap anything instead they chose. They came together, and threw them down ; and there was a miscellaneous assortment, as you may well believe. Each thought himself well rid of his own burden, and picked out something that had belonged to his neighbor, and started off. But, after a little while, they all came back to the same place and begged for their old burdens back again. They had found that the new bur- dens hurt in a way they had not imagined : they were used to the old, and found them easier to carry than the new. Another happiness-killer is foreboding. Look over your own lives and answer this question : is it not true that the larger part of the sorrows you have suffered from, the larger number of the burdens that have crushed out the joy of your life, the diseases, the calamities, the losses of property and of friends, have really never hap- pened at all ? You have suffered more from the things that did not happen than you ever did 70 THE HAPPY LIFE. from the tilings that occurred. Think how use- less that is. Cease borrowing trouble then, and remember that there never was such a thing as to-morrow. E"obody ever had to carry any burden except to-day's burden; no one ever lived except, to-day, and never will. I am able to give a living illustration of the happiness I have in mind. There is a blind pedler who sells needles and pins, threads and buttons. He was at my door, and the conversation which suggested this topic was held with him. He has not been able to see for a good many years. He was asked, as he stood opposite the Square: "Now that the Spring has opened, and the buds have unfolded, and the leaves are so green and beautiful on the trees, and the grass so fine under foot, do you not miss your eyes, do you not wish you could see ? Does it not make you unhappy to think of the bright world, and of the many things to enjoy in it if you had your vision ? " The answer came, bright, happy, hearty, and free : " ISTo, I never think of repining. I am well, I have a kind and attentive wife, I have a business which gives me an honest support, I have everything that a man needs to make him happy; and I THE HAPPY LIFE. 71 should consider myself mean and contemptible to find fault with my lot.'' The question came again : '' When you hear the voice of friends, do you not wish you could know how they look ? Do you not wish you could see their faces ? " The answer came as quickly as before : " I do see them. My ears are my eyes. My wife describes them until I imagine their faces and know all the generosity and the kind- liness of their looks." '' But, suppose you go to the seashore. Do you not wish you could look out over the ocean and see the white caps at their play ? " ^' Ko ; in imagination 1 do see the waves, the color reflected from the clouds. I hear them surging on the shore, I hear the wind blowing across them. In imagination I see, and rejoice in it all." It was a lesson to me, — to see a man in this condition, that I have pitied so many times as I have watched him going about the streets. I am not sure but henceforth it will be more rational for him to pity me. He has learned the secret of content and joy, of taking the beauty and good of life. He has something to do, some- thing to love, something to hope for. And these essentials of the happy life are not 72 THE HAPPY LIFE. monopolies. The richest men of the world can- not possibly buy the things that are essential to your happiness. Nor can any man keep them from your control. All the elements, — beauty, life, love, joy, peace, — the things that make happiness here, and that make the hope of the grandest things hereafter, are free. Wherefore, then, do you spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth not? Free as the air are all things that are necessary to the making of the happy life. NOVEL- READING. BY W. L. Sheldon. I will be glad to be and do, And glad of all good men that live, For they are woof of Kature too ; Glad of the poets every one, Pure Longfellow, great Emerson, And all that Shakspere's world can give. When the road is dust, and the grass dies, Then will I gaze on the deep skies ; And if Dame Nature frown in cloud. Well, mother — then my heart shall say— You cannot so drive me away; I will still exult aloud. Companioned of the good hard ground Whereon stout hearts of every clime, In the battles of time, Foothold and couch have found ! Joy to the laughing troop That from the threshold starts. Led on by courage and immortal hope. And with the morning in their hearts. — Edward Bowland Sill, (74) NOVEL- READING. T BELIEVE in tlie novel. It is an excellent A panacea for the troubled mind and a worthy instrument for keeping us in touch with life. It is a relief sometimes to have a change of mood and a change of atmosphere. The easiest method for healing the wounds of bitterness or recovering from the effects of anxiety is to do something which will make us think about something else. I do not mean any form of novel; because there is a certain kind that would emphatically put us out of touch with life and be anything but a panacea for the moods which may dominate us. If you wish to escape from a certain attitude of mind, go to a book that deals with something else. Do not, under any circumstances, take the one that analyzes the mood which is natural to 76 NOVEL-READING. you, and wMch. would lead you to philosophize about it. The surest way to become "philo- sophicaP^ over an experience may be to avoid philosophizing about it. The best way to foster melancholy is to study the anatomy of it. The best way to rid yourself of melancholy is to stop thinking about it, to stop thinking about your- self, and find means for making yourself think about what is going on in the lives of others. Often as this has been said, it is said none too often, for it is a lesson that is hard to learn. The novel has come to stay. It is, I fancy, a form of literature which is going to survive through all times. Indeed, we cannot overcome a certain wonder that it should be such a recent form of literature. Why did they not have it in the days of Athens ? Yet, we know, the ^^ story '^ has existed in one form or another through all ages, although only within the last few centuries has it taken the definite shape it now possesses. The fairy-tales of earlier times, the stories of the animal world as they have come down to us, the myth and the allegory, the fanciful talk sup- posed to be going on among the denizens of the forest, — what were these but novels, save for the fact that there was a half -belief in them — :NrOVEL-READING. 77 because the mind of the mature man in those days resembled the mind of the child at the present time. Even now, our real interest in a story is because of the actual amount of truth involved in it. There is in all of us a touch, and a beautiful touch, of the child-mind, with its happy confusion between belief and unbelief, between the real and the unreal, the true and the fanciful. When we are reading a story we know perfectly well that just such persons have never lived. Stop us at any moment and put the question : " Do you believe what you are reading ? ^^ and we smile. Yet we cannot check the mood the book awakens as we go on reading it. In making a plea for the novel it is not to be assumed for a moment that I have any sympathy with the " voracious '^ novel-reader. Such a per- son is not put in touch with real life, but rather carried into a kind of dreamland. He comes to live in a world of unreality until his actual sym- pathies are dulled and he can positively shed tears over a story without feeling the slightest sympathy for the suffering going on under his own eyes. When any one is even faintly ap- proaching that state of mind, then novel-reading 78 NOVEL-READING. becomes a vice ; and there is something of this vice existing in most civilized countries now-a- days. People can go on reading fancy pictures of the trials and troubles of human nature until they are disposed to do even less than they would have done to alleviate those trials and troubles when occurring in real life. Sympathy, pity, mercy, tenderness, righteous indignation — these are natural to all of us. They are motive forces which can either affect the will, or find their satisfaction solely by being played upon through art. For this reason, enthusiasm for art of any kind, if carried too far, may easily take the place of action, weakening the will rather than inspir- ing it. You can luxuriate in a sense of pity for a character in a story, and by that very means exhaust your sense of pity for real characters before your eyes. Yet, withal, I cling to my belief in the value of novel-reading. But it depends not only on the amount we do ; it also depends on the kind of novels we read. Unquestionably, there is a certain class of literature now-a-days which is affecting human nature very much as the exten- sive use of drugs is affecting the minds of men and women at the present time. I am not sure IsrOVEL-READING. 79 but that they both gratify the same cravings. There seems to be an instinctive fondness on the part of human nature to indulge in a semi- delirium. Oftentimes, the more you have of that delirium the more you want of it. We have a way of calling such drugs ^^ tonics/^— but half of them are poisons ; and the use of nearly all of them becomes poisonous in the extent to which people are more and more becoming dependent upon them. There are persons who get this semi- delirium not from drugs but from novel-reading. To that extent and in that form it is a vice. It acts like opium, weakening and destroying the will. Men can become so dependent on excite- ment that they cannot get along without it. They are ever demanding a ^^new sensation." Such a thing as intellectual or spiritual debauch- ery is quite within the bounds of possibility. We carry in us the good and bad tendencies of untold preceding ages. For most of us there is a certain fascination in the abnormal. It would seem as if a vast number of people like to read about crimes ; to observe or study the brutal side of human nature. There is a great deal of truth in the attack which Nordau has made upon certain characteristics of the literature 80 NOVEL-READING. at the close of our century. We shall get over this '' degenerate '^ tendency by and by ; although, beyond doubt, there is a certain class of influen- tial writers now playing upon this instinctive hankering for the abnormal. They are giving us what might be called ^^pathological studies." We read them in spite of ourselves, even though they half sicken us. If there were such insti- tutions as "medical schools for the soul," that is where these studies would belong. They cer- tainly have no place in literature. At the time I was reading " The Damnation of Theron Ware " I was reading over again the story of "Adam Bede," by George Eliot. How alike they are, and yet how contrasted ! They both affect us sorrowfully ; both tend to bring tears to the eyes. Both have a fascination. There is truth — an immense amount of truth — in both of the stories. It is human nature pict- ured there ; and yet the chords they play upon are not the same at all. In the case of the former, the story half sickened me, although I could not let it alone. It was to me just as if I were watching a man bleed to death — seeing the blood run — although it was a soul dying, and not a body. It is not the function of art to take NOVEL-READING. 81 US into a clinic or dissecting-room, even if the material dealt with is spiritual rather than physical. Stories of this kind show us how a soul may go to pieces, just as a body may go to pieces, — in either instance as the effects of disease. In contrast, consider the story of "Adam Bede.^^ This is a great, great work of art. It does not sicken us or make us shudder. It is the struggle of healthy, natural man portrayed for us there. In the writings of George Eliot, it is the average human nature, not the abnormal "freak,'^ that we have delineated for us. Where there is sin or crime, you see the effort to rise above it — to get beyond it. We come from the perusal of such literature as from a new baptism. It makes us feel as if, in spite of the evil everywhere, it would be worth our while to rush out in the effort to conquer it, in the faith that mankind may outlive it and pass above it. It would seem as if many of our leading writers feel that the stock of subjects for the novel has been nearly exhausted. They are searching the length and breadth of the land for a new theme or a new situation. Hopeless of dealing still with the universal elements of human nature, 82 NOVEL-READING. such as formed the material for Shakspere, they look to the sporadic, the exceptional, the abnor- mal. They know that such themes will be inex- haustible; because, while there is one average human nature, there may be ten thousand abnor- mal, degenerate variations. This search for new themes shows a shocking want of originality. The old writers who were masters in their art were not perplexed from the lack of novelty. They were quite willing to use the same subject-material over and over again. For a hundred years the dramatists of Greece worked upon the same few stories gathered out of the great epic of Homer. The great painters of the Renaissance endlessly repeated the same theme. They felt no lack of opportunity in ever trying anew at the face of the Christ-child or the Madonna. What if there is a wearisome monot- ony in the works of those masters ? Have we anything in the "novelties'^ of the present day which can be compared with them ? Disease is not a normal subject for art, whether it be disease of the body or disease of the soul. It belongs to science — either to the science of medicine, including physiology, or else to some branch of the science of psychology. Normal, NOVEL-READING. 83 healthy human nature can always furnish subject- material for real genius or originality. Con- trast, for instance, some of these " pathological studies/' such as ^^The Heavenly Twins/' ^^Tess/' or ^^The Damnation of Theron Ware/' with such stories as "Eudder Grange/' by Stockton, and " The Lady of the Aroostook/' by Howells. In that story by Stockton we have a charming picture, giving us in exquisite comedy a study of the trials and tribulations, the joys and sorrows, of early married life. I wish every man and woman on the face of the earth could read that novel. There is no pathology there. It is just a delightful story. From the day when the two young people launched out in their housekeep- ing experiment in a canal-boat, along with their extraordinary and most original " domestic " and their quaint '' boarder," down to their final exper- iment in rural life on a farm, it is a masterpiece. The fact that such stories can be written shows that subject-material is not exhausted; but that there is a transient decline in literary genius in the tendency to reach out wildly for the gro- tesque, the fantastic, the abnormal. A few such stories as "One Summer," by Blanche Willis Howard, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men/' by 84 E^OVEL-KEADING. Walter Besant^ "Mrs. Lex and Mrs. AlesMne," by Stockton^ "Debit and Credit/^ by Freitag, "The Else of Silas Lapham/^ by W. D. Howells, are worth a whole library of such literature as " The Heavenly Twins/' " The Damnation of Theron Ware/' and the nauseating tales of Zola. Much of the so-called " realism '' that we are being deluged with in art and literature now-a- days is rather a form of perverted idealism. It gives us actual facts or experiences, but does not show them in their true relationship to other facts or experiences, and so affects us rather with a sense of unreality. Some of the so-called idealists impress me as much more truly realistic in their methods, giving a more genuine picture of actual reality, than the "realists'' themselves. We are getting tired of art without a soul behind it or a soul at the centre of it. A novel can be a mere splash of color, just as much as a so-called painting. The kind of idealism that I like to recognize in a story is the kind that seems always to show the author in sympathy with the characters he is describing. Not that he rewards his good characters or punishes his bad ones ; nor that he NOYEL-READING. 85 makes you '' like '' all his diaracters, — but you can feel the touch of sympathy on his part even where he makes you despise the people he is sketching for you. Your respect for the dignity of human nature continues just the same whether you are touched by the humor, the evil, or the pathos. This is why I prefer Howells, for in- stance, to Zola. The one seems in love with human nature in spite of its weaknesses and eccentricities ; while the other seems to have a perverted contempt for it. Both are realists ; yet how unlike they are ! There is keen, warm, pro- found sympathy manifested in the writings of Howells. While he makes us pity the weaknesses of men and women, somehow he never lets us despise our common human nature. It is realism portrayed by a healthy, normal vision, which ap- preciates the fact that there is always a soul in "things natural.'' Some of his novels, for this reason, I have read many times. There is another form of idealistic realism that may be equally impressive, although we have to be much more on our guard lest we be misled by it. I have in mind, for example, such a work as "Les Miserables,'' by Victor Hugo. This might be be called a "romantic'' realism. There 86 NOVEL-READING. never were such types of men as " Javert" and "Jean Valjean." They are creations pure and simple, out of the fancy of the author — not creations in the sense in which we would apply the term to the characters of Thackeray or Haw- thorne, but rather as giving us motive forces in combinations such as we should never come upon in real life. The combinations are unreal. Such persons never could have existed. But the portrayal of the workings of each motive force may be thoroughly true. The conscience-motive, for instance, as shown in the evolution of charac- ter in "Jean Valjean,^^ is wholly true to human nature, real and genuine to the last degree. The two types of duty, contrasted in the two charac- ters, "Javert '' and "Jean Valjean,'' are types such as we see around us every day. In fact, they are the two eternal types. And therefore I look upon " Les Miserables '' as a great work of art. It is a genuine picture of the forces at work in human nature, although, perhaps, too much disguised by "romance.'' When a writer who is not a genius tries this method he becomes erratic in the ex- treme — until we have such a ludicrous picture as " The Count of Monte Christo,'' by Dumas, so popular everywhere with boys. NOVEL-REAI)IN"G. S7 I have been speaking of the novel chiefly as a means of diversion or amusement to the mind, as if, when reading it, we were indulging in a form of play. Even if we read from this standpoint it would be legitimate and natural. Perhaps the novel of to-day, with its peculiar characteristics, has led people more and more to read from this attitude, as if solely for the sake of diversion, until many cultivated people would be rather ashamed of owning to a decided taste for this form of literature. And yet, art is art ; and, if it is true art, then our indulgence in it will always mean something more than play. Comedy may be as profound as tragedy. When thinking of the great masters of this type of literature, I always link them with my thoughts of Shakspere. Alas for the person who would have a lurking shame at being devoted to the writings of George Eliot ! We may get as much for our higher culture, for the development of mind and heart, for the enrichment of our whole intellectual or spiritual nature, by reading the story of ^^ Maggie Tulliver'' or ^^Eelix Holt^^ as from reading Dante or Plato, Emerson or Dar- win, Pascal or Goethe. I make a plea for this 88 NOVEL-READIITG. higher form of literature, therefore, not as a mere panacea to the mind, but as a means for the highest culture we may be capable of. Perhaps the best means of distinguishing between what we would call the entertaining story and the work of actual genius, would be in recognizing that the genius creates characters^ while the ordinary writer giyes us interesting sit- uations, picturesque moods, or striking dialogues. When you think of Thackeray, it is not the titles of his novels or certain special situations which occur to you. You may even have forgotten the titles. It is rather the names of the characters that begin to arise before you. It will be " Becky Sharp,^^ ^^ Major Pendennis," "Amelia,'^ "Colonel Newcomb,^' and many others. They seem to you like living men and women with whom you may have been intimately acquainted, or whose characters have come before you for your closest scrutiny. You may not remember just what those persons said or did in the stories. But the people themselves — what they were — left an impression that cannot be effaced. So is it with most of the characters in the stories of Charles Dickens. You may have to think twice in order to recall in which one of the NOYEL-READI^^^G. 89 novels you find ^^Wilkins Micawber"; yet the name, like the name of " Sam Weller/' will be as immortal in literature as that of Napoleon Bonaparte in history. When you think of Haw- thorne, what comes to your mind ? Suppose I mention to you '^ The Marble Faun.'^ Is it this, that or the other scene which rises before you ? No ; I fancy that what comes to your mind will be the names of "Hilda/^ ^^Donatello/^ "Miriam/^ and others. Just so would it be with " The Scarlet Letter''— you think of ^^Arthur Dimmesdale'' and "Hester/' In these great writers you have an overwhelming sense of what the persons were^ rather than of what they did or said. Consider, in contrast, a lighter class of stories — interesting, charming in their way, pleasant to read, soothing to moods, just adapted for relaxing the mind. I mention the author of " Marcella." You will think at once what I mean. Mrs. Humphrey Ward does not create characters ; she gives us striking situations, interesting pictures of the struggle going on in the industrial and religious world. "Eobert Elsmere" is of less consequence as a man than in the tendencies he represents in the new phases of religious life. Take away the religious aspect from the story 90 NOVEL-READING. and little or nothing would be left there. Ee- move the pictures of the social and industrial struggle going on in England, and what would be left to "Marcella^^? The Great Masters who can create characters ! They leave us a heritage of immortal worth. Again and again those lines have come back to me from Emerson, where he says : '* If Thought unlock her mysteries, If Friendship on me smile, I walk in marble galleries, I talk with kings the while." This is our true experience when reading over and over again the stories of the great writers, the novelists I have mentioned. We are affected very much as the mind of the scientist must be affected when at last he unravels some of the secrets of Nature and feels his whole being flooded with new light from the deeper interpre- tation he can put upon reality. In so far as our ordinary life is concerned, we never can see the truly real, because we cannot see the incidents occurring to us in their complete relationship. We can never know a single friend through and through, as we can know the charac- NOVEL-READIKG. 91 ters of Dickens or Hawthorne. There is some- thing supremely solemn in this close insight we are getting into the secrets of human nature. When the pictures given us are in a normal perspective in the story, the whole character is before us, not just one small part of it. Some- times, for this reason, I am inclined to put the works of George Eliot as superior even to those of Shakspere. In her portrayal of human nature she seems at times to be unraveling the mysteries of deity. It is one characteristic of the genius in any form of literature, but especially in the novel, that the genius does not nourish our preju- dices, but makes us more perfectly human and sympathetic. How hard it is to detect a preju- dice in Shakspere ! And this is true of the great coterie of novelists whom I have named. The petty writer, with his eyes fixed so close to the scene he is describing that he cannot see it in any other relationship, is full of his prejudices, and nourishes them in us at the same time. But who, for example, could make out from the writings of Hawthorne or George Eliot just what religious beliefs they held, any more than you could make out the religious theories of Shakspere from his dramas ! 92 ]SrOVEL-KEADI]SrG. Tlie pity of it is that we do most of our novel- reading when we are yery young, before we are out of our teens. And then, as a rule, our atten- tion is, more than anything else, on the love-tale or the love-motive. We do not see the book as a complete work of art. We read it and lay it aside for another, and then for another, until all that we have read becomes loosely fused into one general vague impression. I have wondered if we would not get more of the higher culture from novel-reading if there were as limited an amount of this form of literature as there is of poetry. In order to value the worth of a poem we must have read it over and over again. This is almost equally true in reference to the great novels. It would be worth our while if we could read a few of these classic works anew every few years. They would mean something quite different to us each time. I remember some one telling me how he had laughed and laughed over the humor of '' Don Quixote " when reading it before he was out of his teens ; and then how, years later, when again he read it, it was impossible for him to keep back the tears from his eyes. In the first read- ing it was merely a humorous tale. In the second reading it was a profound portrayal of the weak- NOYEL-READIKG. 93 nesses of our human nature, as they exist now-a- days as much as in the time of Cervantes. How many, likewise, have read ^^ Vanity Eair^^ when quite young, and been struck mainly by its humor, seeing it only as the story of a clever parvenu. Then, perhaps, they have read it ten or fifteen or twenty years later, — and what another story it seemed ! How it cut us to the heart to feel that Thackeray was showing us the actual world we live in, and what a world of illusions it is, where we go chasing baubles or pursuing phantoms, letting that which is of most value slip out of our grasp ! " Vanity Fair ^^ is the '^ Don Quixote ^^ of the Nineteenth Century, showing us the world of illusions, where people cling to the notion that they can get happiness without earn- ing it, never waking up to see their mistake, but in their failure calling everything "vanity.'^ If only we had time to read over, again and again, such a work as ^^Don Quixote '' or "Vanity Fair,'^ as the Greek read his Homer ! But we sacrifice the classic for the ephemeral; and in doing so make the heaviest of all sacrifices, — abandon our own spiritual culture. No great work of art of any kind — whether sculpture, music, painting, or the novel — can 94 NOVEL-READING. exert its true influence upon us unless we liave viewed it, or listened to it, or read it, a number of times and in different moods, or at different epochs in our lives. Art does not have the right sort of elevating effect upon us at the present time, because we are not able to hold our attention long enough upon any one great work, so that it may secure a firm and lasting hold upon us. We may be trying to cultivate twenty different sides of our nature, and in that very effort fail to cul- tivate any side at all. The very necessity we are under at the present time of "keeping up'^ with ephemeral literature is lowering the standard of literature. Our culture is becoming so diffused as to be almost no culture at all. I am not sure but that the multiplicity of free libraries may be doing almost as much harm as good, because of this one mistake which they encourage in our methods for culture. People are getting out of the habit of owning books ; and yet you can never get much out of a book unless you own it ; unless you can ha,ve it lying about on your table, or on your mantel, where you can pick it up and read it at odd moments, or go back to it in varying moods. A small private library of books bought volume by volume from what we NOVEL-READING. 95 have saved through, sacrificing other pleasures, may have more value to us than having access to a library of a hundred thousand volumes where those volumes do not belong to us. It is strange that we lay out so much for our houses, so much for pictures, so much for our table, for the pleas- ures that lose their significance the instant they are over, and so little for the library which can nourish the mind and give peace to the heart. Any book that is worth reading twice should be owned — no matter how great the sacrifice one has to make in order to possess it. And any book that is really a work of art is worth read- ing twice, or many times, and we do not get the value of it until we have done so. THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 7 Philip S. Thacheb. If the chosen soul could never be alone In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God, No greatness ever had been dreamed or done. Among dull hearts a prophet never grew ; The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude. — Lowell, Beauty — a living presence of the earth, Surpassing the most fair ideal forms Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed From earth's materials — waits upon my steps; Pitches her tent before me as I move, An hourly neighbor. Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old Sought in the Atlantic main — w^hy should they be A history only of departed things. Or a mere fiction of what never was ? For the discerning intellect of man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day. —Wordsworth. Into thy calm eyes, O Nature, I look and rejoice; Prayerful, I add my one note to the Infinite voice, As shining and singing and sparkling glides on the glad day, And eastward the swift-rolling planet wheels into the gray. ^ Celia Thaxter, (98) THE SIGHT OF NATURE. NATURE, as her name indicates, is always about to be born. How quietly her face is renewed, and tbe Spring and Summer brought forth ! Only a few weeks ago, and the rippling laugh of the streams was held fast in the embrace of the frost, the trees, like skeletons, cracked in the intense cold, the plants lay torpid beneath the hard earth, unbroken silence reigned in wood and grove, in whose sheltered nooks the snow lingered. The fierce blast from the North chilled us as it rolled through cloudy worlds of sleet or sighed its mel- ancholy crescendo through the pines. But when the soft gales from the South began to blow, a quickening power grasped the life which was stored in seeds and roots, and elevated it through myriad conduits of branchy twig and stalk, and 100 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. the early blossoms began to call the bees from their winter's sleep, while the arbntus sent up the first breath of fragrance from under the leaves. Sunbeams melted the ice and snow into music, which sang in the rills as they danced towards the sea, and decked the rocks with a green dress of moss and lichen. The waving trees were thrown into quivering joy as the timid buds tried to unfold in the morning breeze, while the hilltops caught and reflected the far-off smile of the sun. The birds, full of rapturous songs, made the woods ring with their melodies and the quiet air vibrate with their happy notes. The gardens were brightened as crocuses and tulips began to peep and nod, each day giving birth to more. Soon the orchards beamed with prolonged delight in the blooms that foretold a fruitful Autumn, every woodland glade unfolded revela- tions of beauty, and wild-flowers brightened the banks of the rivers. The sun, like a great scene- painter, was busy coloring the changeable drapery which decks the dome above. Here, he spread his dazzling fleeces ; there, he tinged the floating curtains ; yonder, he rolled up his black shrouds of rain and thunder. The clouds lay languidly on the sky in delicate forms and opalescent hues^ THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 101 like soft islets in a great sea of nnfatlioniable splendor. Who can see this resurrection fiat sweep over the whole of Nature, and not sing, with Lowell, — " Now is the high- tide of the year ! And whatever of life hath ebbed away Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer, Into every bare inlet and creek and bay. No matter how barren the past may have been, 'Tis enough for us now that leaves are green; We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing That skies are clear and grass is growing." To the great poets, Nature looks radiant with a divine beauty, as love lights up the face of a friend. The heavens are filled with starry fire, the earth clothed in magnificence, and the flowers robed in fairer raiment than imperial Solomon ever wore. The royal hills decked with trees, the orchards that glorify a thousand plains, the vineyards that purple the gentle slopes, the grandeur and solemn silence of forest depths, the ripple or roar of the sea, the stupendous mountains that lift themselves up to heaven like 102 THE SIGHT OF NATUKE. the earth stretching out her hands in prayer, are symbols and types of that which lies beneath, suggesting to the spiritual sense a glory which eye hath not seen, but which overflows the visible like a tideless ocean, and in which it is lost as vapor in the sun. Of the average man it may be said, as Words- worth wrote, — *'A primrose by the river's brim A yellow primrose is to him, And it is nothing more." He has eyes, but they see not, because blinded with the dust of life, and his spirit is starving amidst a banquet of splendor at which a thousand angels would find enough and to spare. How different with Wordsworth himself, when he said, — "I have learned To look on Nature not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth. . . . I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 103 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." Yet, for his lack of sight, the average man is more to be pitied than condemned, because he has not had his eyes opened to Nature — he needs the culture of poet and painter. In such a case it is not wilful unseeing, but lack of understanding how to see. When once we begin to enter into sympathy with Nature we realize why, to the poets, every natural thing is so pregnant with significance. It is because " God ^s in matter everywhere.'' '' He murmurs near the running brooks A sweeter music than their own." It is because the spirit in ourselves is akin to the Spirit in Nature that in all common things around us we become aware of the present deity. To the appreciative soul everything has a voice, and speaks ! — *' Every blade of grass that springs; Every cool worm that crawls, content as the eagle on soaring wings ; 104 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. Every summer's day instinct with life; every dawn when from waking bird And morning hum of the bee a chorus of praise is heard ; Every gnat that sports in the sun for his little life of a day; Every flower that opens its cup to the dews of a per- fumed May." But it is difficult to see the great in what is near^ the divine in what is ordinary ; because, in order to understand the spiritual meanings of common things we need to be ourselves spiritual; and the worldly mind is strong with- in us. You will hear people making much ado about a rare and costly orchid, who never think of bestowing any attention upon the wonderful- ness of the dandelion. You will find others excited about the beauty of a diamond, who have never cared to watch the rain-drops glisten- ing in the light. You will find still others fluttered about the appearance of a comet, who have bestowed scarcely a thought upon the unutterable glories of the heavens under which they nightly walk. You will find people long- ing to see the great sights of foreign lands, who THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 106 are heedless of the wonders to be seen from their own doors in the ever-changing scenery of the clouds, in the wealth of trees and flowers, in the rising and setting sun. It is not beauty that is wanting in the scenery around us ; it is the seeing eye. It needed only the sight of a field-daisy to stir the heart of Eobert Burns, it needed only the nodding of the daffodil to wake the muse of Wordsworth, because these poets had the seeing eye. With profound insight Lowell sings: ** Thou seest no beauty save thou make it first; Man, woman, Kature, each is but a glass In which man sees the image of himself." And a similar thought is in Shakspere : '* The jewel that we find, we stop and take it Because we see it; but what we do not see We tread upon, and never think of it." In his "Ode on Dejection,^^ Coleridge tells us that, in looking at the world, " We receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth Nature live; Ours is the wedding-garment, ours the shroud." 106 THE llGHT OF MATURE. Then lie assures us that if, in Nature, we would see "Aught of higher worth, From the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist Enveloping the earth." Society is full of fever and complexity, of contrivance, pretense, and bustle. Everything there speaks of ambition, care, disappointment, or of luxury and empty display. But, at times, we who have been harassed by social conditions, pierced by envious arrows, stung by poisonous tongues, and bruised by the cast-iron hearts amidst which our own have been tossed, have gone, wearied and oppressed by the world^s stifling atmosphere, into the stillness of Nature, her sublimity and tenderness, until the earth has seemed like an undestroyed Paradise saturated with the Divine Presence. In the cool of the day we have almost expected to hear the voice of God break the spell and audibly speak his will in the oracles of bird, breeze and blossom. We have felt, as never before, *' The simple, the sincere delight. The habitual scene of hill and dale, THE SIGHT OF NATURE. lOf The rural herds, the vernal gale, The tangled vetches' purple bloom, The fragrance of the bean's perfume." And if, from the solitary sea, or the summit of a mountain, we have looked up into the dark depths of night, and felt ** The silence that is in the starry sky. The sleep that is among the lonely hills," we have been introduced to '' That blessed mood In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened." And not alone in the familiar scenes and landscapes at our very hand is the sight of Nature powerful for our uplifting and calming. If we have ever gazed upward through the won- derful instrument of the astronomer, upon those bright worlds throbbing in the great depths of space like the happy thoughts of the unwearied God, we have seen awful but splendid things. a 'VVorlds on worlds are rolling ever.'^ A hundred million come within the range of the telescope, 108 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. and there are millions more so inconceivably distant that their light, though traveling at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, takes hundreds of years to reach this earth. If they were ex- tinguished this instant the inhabitants of earth for hundreds of years would still see their light shining. Some of these vv^orlds are so large that in comparison with them ours is but as an atom compared with a mountain. Ponderous as these enormous bodies are, grav- itation hangs them in space like enormous balls. And all are rushing forward three times faster than the swiftest locomotive, and some of them more rapidly than a cannon-ball. Though jour- neying, as to time, "from creation to decay,'^ they never travel the same path twice. Some have gone out, like watch-fires burned out on eternal hills ; and others are in the process of making. Some have a heat so fierce that if a column of ice forty miles in diameter were pro- jected into them with the velocity of light, it would all melt as it passed in. Amid the fiery atmosphere of some, there are storms which rage with the velocity of more than a hundred miles per second,—- storms compared with which our fiercest tornadoes are but as the breath of a THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 109 summer zephyr. There are clouds which pour down upon certain worlds torrents of molten metal, as rain descends on our earth, while lurid masses of flaming hydrogen rise like vast tongues to a height of hundreds of thousands of miles. With the pyrheliometer we can read the temperature of these worlds, and study their history as revealed in the living lines of light which emanate from their glowing photo- spheres. According to Professor Stokes, the light-waves throb in the ethereal fluid with a velocity equal to eight times the distance around the earth in a single second. The spectroscope enables us to catch a beam of light and spread it out into a band of exquisite colors, and also reveals the pure tints out of which are woven the glory of the gorgeous sunsets, the thousand tinted flowers, the gay plumage of birds, the sparkle of the diamond, — and even the flash of the coal flre, which is nothing but imprisoned light let loose. These light-waves ripen the apple, but do not shake it from the bough ; they paint the rose a blushing red, without visibly moving it ; they cover the rocks with moss and lichen, without wearing them away. According to Lord 110 THE SIGHT OF KATURE. Kelvin, what are called the "Eontgen rays" send out seventy quadrillions of vibrations per second. At the rate of one hundred counts per minute, it would take more than one billion, three hundred million years to count the vibra- tions of a single second. Yet no ear can catch a sound of their music as they flow in the gray of dawn and reflect ripples of amber and gold. How eminently fitted to symbolize him " who cov- ereth himself with light as with a garment " ! And how much is here, in the contemplation of all this marvel and splendor and power in Nature, which should calm our littleness and exalt our reverence and our aspiration ! "Fairer grows the earth each morning To the eyes that watch aright. Every dew-drop sparkles warning Of a miracle in sight, Of some unsuspected glory Waiting in the old and plain. Poet's dream nor traveler's story Words such wonders as remain. "Everywhere the gate of Beauty Fresh across the pathway swings, As we follow truth or duty Inward to the heart of things ; THE SIGHT OF NATURE. Ill And we enter, foolish mortals, Thinking now the heart to find, — There to gaze on vaster portals I Still the Glory lies behind ! " We have glanced at the infinitely large. If we look at Nature through the microscope we shall be impressed with the exquisite beauty and perfection of the infinitely little. Think of creatures, endowed with life and motion, so small that we inhale millions of them every day and do not know it. Tens of thousands of them could live and move in the water which floats on the surface of your eye, and yet cause you no inconvenience. These minute careering creatures avoid or come in contact with one another; have heart, lungs, blood, corpuscles in that blood; and feed, and propagate. In every room, not myriads only, but billions exist. And in the midst of them, as in the center of a cyclone of whirling atoms, we move and work. Even what we call '' matter ^' is ever dancing, never at rest. According to Professor Tait, in a mass of hydrogen every particle has on an average 17,700,000,000 collisions per second with other particles. In every second its course is 112 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. wholly changed 17,700,000,000 times. And the particle itself moves at the rate of seventy miles in a minute. The number of particles in a cubic inch of air^ in the ordinary state of the atmos- phere, is approximately represented by a figure 3 with twenty ciphers after it. The diameter of a particle is not very different from one 250-millionth part of an inch. The beauty of the infinitely little is, in other directions, no less marked and interesting. If through a powerful microscope we examine one of the tiny plumes of a butterfly's wing, we shall see a perfection of color that will make the richest hues of the artist look wan and defy the tracing of the subtlest brush. Or, if we take a little seed and watch it after it has been covered with earth, we shall see it grow larger every day by attracting to itself gaseous elements from the soil, air, sun, and moisture. These atoms travel to the very spot in the growing organism where they are needed to form the right substance and pattern of the root, stalk, flower, and fresh seed, and arrange themselves in such wonderful ways that it almost seems as though each atom was intelligent and saw its proper place. THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 113 Equally wonderful with the energy within vegetable life is the energy that surrounds our- selves. When a cyclone tears the forest from its roots, or an earthquake destroys a city, we see the effect of destructive forces. But these are weak compared with those silent forces whose presence the finest ears cannot detect and whose secret only the acutest intellects can interpret. A drop of water, for example, — a single dew-drop, the morning bath of the lily, the drink of the humming-bird from the floweret's cup, quivering in our sight for a moment and then scattered by an insect's flight or brushed away by a breath of air, — is, according to Pro- fessor Faraday, the sheath of electric force sufiicient to charge eight hundred thousand Ley den jars. So is it everywhere, in earth and air. From whatever point of view, there is a fascination which enthralls us as we look at Nature. The simplest thing is deeper than our fathoming and higher than our measurement. And this, because filled with the unsearchable and incom- prehensible God. *' He hides within the lily A strong and tender care, 114 THE SIGHT OF NATUBE. That wins the earth-born atoms To glory of the air. ** That pebble is older than Adam I Secrets it hath to tell; These rocks — they cry out history, Could I but listen well. ** That pool knows the ocean-feeling Of storm and moon-led tide ; The sun finds its East and West therein, And the stars find room to glide. ** That lichen's crinkled circle Creeps with the Life Divine, Where the Holy Spirit loitered On its way to this face of mine. *' I can hear these violets chorus To the sky's benediction above : — And we all are together lying On the bosom of Infinite Love." Moreover, feel that the universe is centralized by God, and all tenderness will grow tenderer, all terrors will grow mild, and all splendors will improve. When we see God in all, and under- stand our relationship to all, there is no flower whose beauty we may not share, not a leaping stream whose merry dance we may not join, not THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 115 a tree robing itself in riclier life wMcli we may not enjoy^ not a cloud sailing in tlie blue ocean of the sky with whose peaceful spirit we may not be borne along ! The joy of the whole cre- ation is ours, and the consciousness that ** Everywhere his splendor shineth." In these ^^ times of refreshing'' God gives him- self. Heaven opens to the open soul. Over the barrenest places of life there spreads a robe of summer green ; in the night of sorrow the stars of hope shine. In a word, we walk about the world like children in the hoTnestead, Many a time during "vacation days/' if our hearts are open and receptive, may consciousness of this fact arise within us to bless us. The universe becomes ours. We are part and parcel of it all ; owners of it all. It has been given to ns. It is ours to enjoy; it is ours to grow in. With such sight of Nature as this, and such apprehension of "partnership" in it with the Divine Spirit permeating it all, we shall enter into the gracious meaning which it has for us as we have never before done. When we sit on the cliff overhanging the sea, and look on the 116 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. majesty and mystery of the shimmering waters, or listen to the monotonous plash of the wave- lets as they kiss the sand, or hear the thunderous anthem of the billows when old ocean is up in his angry might and the waters leap together with the noise and exultation of charging armies ; or if we go into the mountains, and see the grandeur that sits upon their brow when every summit is like an altar flaming to the skies, or watch them when the moon rises calm and holy, bathing their slopes with tender stillness and cleansing light 5 or if we penetrate into the heart of the forest and sit beneath the trees, with the wind so wild and the air so pure, and take in large draughts of health and strength ; — whenever and wherever we '' lie down in green pastures" and walk "beside the still waters,'^ if our minds roam beyond things seen and temporal to things unseen and eternal, we shall understand why Bryant could write — *' To him who in the love of Mature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language. For his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty ; and she glides Into his darker musings with a mild THE SIGHT OF NATURE. 117 And healing sympathy that steals away Their sharpness ere he is aware." And when the golden rest-days have flown, and we return to the busy home and world, memory will furnish us with a collection of pictures such as no studio ever saw. We shall see again that dazzling sunrise whose crimson and gold are fadeless and make river and lake and sea a dream of fairy-land. We shall see the clouds trip up the feet of the nimble moon- beams and detain the silvery huntress from the chase. We shall see the solitary grandeur and sublime waste of mountains we have climbed. We shall see the stream as it creeps down the canon and purls over the pebbles, while babbling tales of coolness and purity. Pleasant glades and lonely glens will haunt the mind like a dream of heaven. Above all, we shall have gained "Attentive and believing faculties, To see and hear, and breathe the evidence. Of God's deep wisdom in the natural world." We shall be conscious that Nature abounds in well-springs of joy; that beauty and love make the air forever bright and warm. 118 THE SIGHT OF NATURE. " The voices of happy Nature, And the heavens' sunny gleam, Reprove thy sick heart's fancies, Upbraid thy foolish dream. Listen, and I v^ill tell thee The song creation sings. From the humming of bees in the heather To the flutter of angels' wings. An echo rings forever. The sound can never cease ; It speaks to God of glory. It speaks to earth of peace. Above thy peevish wailing Rises that holy song, — Above earth's foolish clamor. Above the voice of wrong. So leave thy sick heart's fancies. And lend thy willing voice To the sweet, sweet song of glory That bids the world rejoice." Books of Interest Geneva Series Of Attractive Booklets : : : Handsome in Form. Popular and Inspiring in Contents. "We especially commend these little books to young men and women for their uplifting influ- ence."— -^os^on Home Journal, The House Beautiful. By William C. Gannett Love Does It All. By Ida Lemon Hildyard The Happy Life. By Minot J. Savage Accepting Ourselves. By Arthur M. Tschudy The Home. By Phoebe M. Butler Culture without College. By William C. Gannett Serenity. By James H. West Beauty of Character. By Paul R. Frothingham The Quest of the Holy Grail. By Charles F. Bradley Home to the Ideal. By Frederic A. Hinckley ** Beautiful and helpful. An inspiration to higher thinking and nobler liymg.— Journal of Education. Paper, choice edition, silk-stitched, white or tinted covers, put up in entitled envelopes, 15 cents each. (Eight to one address for $1.00.) Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by J7^A\ES H. WEST, Publisher, BostOfi, Mass. Writings by William C Gannett THE HOUSE BEAUTirUL. 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