indicated to Providence his sense and resentment of the injury by abolishing in his dominions the Christian religion for a fortnight!

9. So wide-spread is this discontent, that a talent for unhăppinèss is fast getting to be a source of distinction; and among the many tones in the hubbub of universal talk, the voice that quickliëst arrests attention is the voice that wails, snarls, groans, shrieks, howls, or hisses. Our best qualities and our best people are apt to catch the infection of this screaming forcible-feeblenèss, and to lose their power to cheer in their passion to declaim. Even our religious people, paralyzed, seemingly by a contemplation of the works of Satan, are not celebrated for entering into the joy of their Lord. Our morality, the moment it sets about the work of reform, has a strong impulse to become grim, haggard, and screechy; and even the loftier virtues are prone to put on a vinegar aspect, and to depress rather than exhilarate.

10. Our benevolence, for instance, sometimes labors most conscientiously to make itself unamiable, diffuses unhappinèss from the best of motives, and, growing sour and shrewish by its contact with suffering or contemplation of wrong, dispenses as much gall to its opponents as it does balm to the afflicted and oppressed. It seems to find a săturnine' satisfaction in fastening its attention on the darkest side of life. If there be anything base or brutal in the foulest dens of metropolitan iniquity, see how eagerly it seizes it, emphasizes it, detaches it from its relations, talks about it, writes about it, throws it into the faces and stamps it on the imaginations of young and old, in the hope, we may suppose, of invigorating the sense of right by corrupting the sense of beauty, and converting us into philanthropists by a process which begins by disgusting us with human nature.

11. Scenes of misery and sin thus occupying the most conspicuous places in the picture gallery of the mind, it is not surprising that many humane people, aghast at the contemplation, should gradually associate cheerfulnèss with selfishness, and dutifully determine that nothing but wretchedness shall escape from their tongues and encamp on their faces. This morbid benevolence, first adopted as a duty, soon resolves itself into a taste; and then they hunt eagerly on the trail of offences to

1 Săť′ ur nîne, under the influence of the planet Saturn; hence, not

readily susceptible of excitement; dull; heavy; grave.

gather fresh topics of horrifying scandal, and every new batch of crimes furnishes additional material for their ghastly gossip. And, to crown all, in exploring the causes of the wickedness and wretchedness which oppress their imaginations, they have a strange proclivity to hit on those things which are capable in themselves of affording innocent pleasure, and too often think their purpose is attained when they have pasted a thundering "Thou shalt not!" on all amusements and recreations.

12. Now this ascetic acid in our morality and religion must be modified by an æsthetic' element, or we strip from virtue and duty and devotion the "awful" loveliness by which they attract as well as command, inspire as well as warn, cheer as well as threaten. It is as dangerous to morality as it is destructive to cheerfulness to make virtue the husky and haggard thing it is so often held up to be; and accordingly, in the formation of harmonious character, great stress is to be laid on the education of the sense of beauty. There is nothing that cheers so much as this. The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.

13. Infuse into the purpose with which you follow the various employments and professions of life, no matter how humble they may be, this sense of beauty, and you are transformed at once from an artisan into an artist. The discontent you feel with the work you are compelled to do comes from your doing it in the spirit of a drudge. Do it in the spirit of an artist, with a perception of the beauty which inheres in all honest work, and the drudgery will disappear in delight. It is the spirit in which we work, not the work itself, which lends dignity to labor; and many a field has been plowed, many a house has been built, in a grander spirit than has sometimes attended the government of empires and the creation of epics. The cheerfulness which comes from the beautiful performance of such secluded duties disclaims all aid from mere animal spirits, and attaches itself resolutely to what is immortal in our being. It is "a masculine and severe thing; the recreation of the judgment, the jubilee of reason; filling the soul, as God fills the universe, silently and without noise!"

1Œs thět' io, of, or pertaining to, the science of the beautiful.

II.

61. CHEERFULNESS.

PART SECOND.

THE primind the

HE great crowning principle of growth in cheerful charac

ter is the FOOD of the mind-the daily bread of thought, emotion, and experience which the mind eats, and converts into the blood and bone and sinew of character. This, more than anything else, determines our destiny for gladnèss or for gloom. The chief sources of this mental food are external nature, society, and the various forms of literature and art. All these have their cheerful and invigorating or dark and depressing phase, according to the disposition we bring to the feast.

2. Nature is an inexhaustible fountain of cheer—not, indeed, as seen and felt by those whose simple object is to make her yield a certain amount of corn and potatoes for the body, but by those who also regard her as the dear and gracious mother, teeming with food for the brain and heart of her children. Communion with her sights, sounds, colors, and forms-the hieroglyphics1 of God—and with the inner spirit, which gives them life, meaning, and language to the soul-closeness to her mighty heart, and contact with her informing mind-this is the love of nature which inspires, heals, refreshes, sublimes, and cheers.

3. And happy are they whose characters grow and ripen under her genial ministries, and who, in the words of a great poet, speaking from his own deep experience, can testify "of pleasures lying upon the unfolding intellect plenteously as morning dewdrops; of knowledge inhaled insensibly like the fragrance; of dispositions stealing into the spirit like music from unknown quarters; of images uncalled for and rising up like exhalations; of hopes plucked like beautiful wild-flowers from the ruined tombs that border the highways of antiquity, to make a garland for a living forehead; in a word, of nature as a teacher of truth through joy and through gladness, and as a creätress of the faculties through a process of smoothness and delight."

4. But hastening from this attractive theme, whose fullnèss

1 Hi`e ro glyph' iċ, a sacred character; any character or figure which

has, or is supposed to have, a hidden or mysterious meaning.

of wealth we have barely hinted, let us hazard a remark or two on the nature of the mental food we derive from social life. Here, in the intercourse of conversation, there is not only the expression of thoughts and feelings, but the direct passage of mind into mind; and characters, accordingly, are mutually fed and formed. In conversation, to use a violent image, we eat each other up, and this intellectual cannibalism results, if the conversation be good, in an increase of mental substance to all. How important, then, that this great element of culture should be cheerful, sympathetic, enlivening, the graceful play of knowledge, the festivity of intelligence, instead of being the sour, egotistic, sulky, or frivolous thing into which it is so often perverted. A grumbler or bigot in this intercourse should recollect that he is spoiling the temper of others in parading his own, and that a voluminous catalogue of his aches and pains, or a fierce outburst of his prejudices and hatreds, is hardly needed to gratify the civil curiosity that inquires after his health, or the polite tolerance that asks his opinion.

5. But of all the expedients to make the heart lean, the brain gauzy, and to thin life down into the consistency of a cambric kerchief, the most successful is the little talk and tattle which, in some charmed circles, is courteously styled conversation. How human beings can live on such meagre fare--how continue existence in such a famine of topics and on such a short allowance of sense-is a great question, if philosophy could only search it out. All we know is that such men and women there are, who will go on dwindling in this way from fifteen to fourscore, and never a hint on their tombstones that they died at last of consumption of the head and marasmus of the heart.

6. The whōle universe of God, spreading out its splendors and terrors, pleading for their attention, and they wonder "where Mrs. Somebody got that divine ribbon in her bonnet!" The whole world of literature, through its thousand trumps of fame, adjuring them to regard its garnered stores of emotion and thought, and they THINK, "It's high time, if John intends to marry Sarah, for him to pop the question!" When, to be sure, this frippery is spiced with a little envy and malice, and prepares its small dishes of scandal and nice bits of detraction, it becomes endowed with a slightly venomous vitality, which does pretty

well in the absence of soul, to carry on the machinery of living, if not the reality of life.

7. Seriously, however, this levity of being, whether innocent or malevolent, which thus splits the mind up into chips and splinters of thought, and leaves it vacant of substance and sap, is it not one, out of many nobler causes, of the rumored lack of cheerfulness in American women?-a fact of which we know nothing except from the melodious wail, alternating with melodramatic shrieks, that comes up from so large a portion of our best feminine literature. The men, of course, are great rascals, and deprive women of their rights, and circumscribe the sphere of their influence, and hypocritically sonnetize Desdemonas1 of the kitchen and Imogens" of the nursery, and are, besides, as superficial as they are wicked-all that is freely granted; but still is it not possible that women, the autocratic rulers at least of social life, can make it a little better subserve its great purpose of educating and enriching the mind without any loss to its mōre festive grace and airier charms?

8. But leaving a topic which is fast treading on the perilous edges of impertinence, let us pass to the consideration of books, the third source of our mental food. Here the influences springing from a communion with nature and intercourse with society are recast by the mind of genius in the form of literature. This literature, in the varieties of its spirit and depth, contains three special forms of genius, according as nature, or society, or bōth, contributed to build them up. The first has derived its inspiration and its nutriment almost exclusively from a communion with external nature; the second from an intercourse with society; while the third combines the two. Authors of this last class have the most robust health of mind, and dispense the most invigorating cheer.

9. But there is still another class, composed of men of large but diseased powers and passions, who perversely misconceive

1 Děs` de mō' na, the heroine of Shakspeare's tragedy of "Othello," daughter of Brabantio, a Venetian senator, and wife of Othello, a Moorish general, who kills her on a groundless belief of her infidelity.

2 Im' o gěn, the wife of Posthu

mus, and the daughter of Cymbeline by a deceased wife, in Shakspeare's play of this name. She is noted for her unalterable fidelity to her hus band under the most trying circumstances.

3 Class (klås).