Chapter I: Mention These Tricks (2)

a fawning dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture." This was the poet Cowley's opinion. "Of all the animals" scolds Boileau, "which fly in the air, walk on the ground, or swim in the sea, from Paris to Peru, from Japan to Rome, the most foolish animal, in my opinion, is man." People must be very bad, indeed, who get opinions as low as the two last quoted. That rapacious vulture George Peabody! that dissembling crocodile William Cowper! that robbing wolf Girard! that thieving fox Charles Sumner! that fawning dog Napoleon Bonaparte! and those most foolish animals Louis Agassiz and Isaac Newton! It does not well become the weakest links in a chain to boast that they gauge that chain's strength, for the chain can be greatly strengthened, upon this easy discovery of those weak links, by simply dropping them out of connection.

And now comes the query: "What is man?" He has always been more or less at a loss for some striking and succinct statement of his peculiar characteristics--of the mark that separates him from other animals. Diogenes Laertius says that Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers, he (Diogenes) plucked a cock, and, bringing him into the school, said "Here is Plato's man." From this joke there was added to the definition "With broad flat nails." Even this definition is just as faulty, as it does not exclude many species of the monkey. Again it was thought that man was the only being who laughs. Says Addison, poetically: "Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above and below him are serious." But scientists refuse to accept this distinction as accurate. "Man is an animal

THAT COOKS HIS VICTUALS,"

says Burke. "So does the buzzard" (in the sun) say the learned men. "Man uses tools," says another. "So does the beaver--the ourang-outang hurls stones, and fights with clubs," say the scientists. Finally, says Adam Smith, in his "Wealth of Nations:" "Man is an animal that makes bargains; no other animal does this--one dog does not change a bone with another." We must be satisfied with this, I suppose, but it is a very faulty declaration, for I have seen one dog change a bone with another, in which instance a big dog traded with a little dog, and impressed the little dog with the desirability, under the circumstances, of the smaller of two bones! And I am not sure but that

ALL BARGAINS, WHETHER HUMAN OR CANINE,

are of that stripe, wherein the superior of two bone or money getters acquaints the inferior with the good points of a bad bargain. Buffon, at the beginning of his Natural History, is unable, even, to give any line of demarcation between vegetable and animal substances, and perplexes the mind with an infinitude of faulty attempts, in turn showing the weak spot in each. "For man is a plant,"

SAYS PLUTARCH,

"not fixed in the earth nor immovable, but heavenly, whose head, rising, as it were, from a root upwards, is turned towards heaven." "A man ought to carry himself in the world," says Henry Ward Beecher, continuing and building on Plutarch's thought, "as an orange-tree would, if it could walk up and down in the garden,--swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air."

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

This is the declaration of the great poet Pope, and a glance across the world's literature will show that the mandate was unneeded. For ages before the birth of the celebrated "wasp of Twickenham," mankind had been at study on the subject. "The burden of history" says George Finlayson, "is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology, what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall be." "Man is the product of his own history," says Theodore Parker. "The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is that at the end of the telescope--

THE STAR THAT IS LOOKING, NOT LOOKED AFTER,

nor looked at." "Man is greater than a world, than systems of worlds; there is more mystery in the union of soul with the physical than in the creation of the universe." This sentence is by Henry Giles. To the first portion of it I give unqualified belief. I believe, too, with John Ruskin, that "the basest thought possible concerning man is that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other." "Man is the metre of all things," says Aristotle,

"THE HAND

is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms." The remark of the great Athenian regarding the hand, while no truer than that one touching the mind, is yet easier of demonstration to the unphilosophical reader. For instance, the printers of the finest engravings to this day use the palm of the hand to apply the ink; the type-setting machine is so far a failure for the want of the human fingers; the most perfect performance of music on a machine yet lacks that _sympathy_ and exception to mathematical rule which the human fingers, highly trained, impart to the keyboard, and the violin, that thing most nearly in communication with the soul of man,--pays no allegiance whatever save to the human hand well practiced in its mastery; the hand skilled in love soothes the aching brow; the whole framework of this instrument, the hand, filled with gold coins, almost without volition spurns the spurious piece; the false bank-note is lifted with suspicion; across the signature the deft fingers run to aid the eye; over the letters the mind of the sightless pushes its loyal touch, and the signal comes faithfully back to the dungeoned intelligence!

OUR OPPORTUNITIES

are the greatest of those of any living beings. It follows, it seems to me, that our responsibilities should be greater, both in justice and in reason. Every opportunity is equivalent to a duty. We owe--with all these miracles of the living world centered and perfected in our bodies,--a duty equally grand and difficult. Let us ennoble ourselves. John Fletcher wrote a beautiful metaphor in very clumsy verse when he said:

Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate,

Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

HOLY WRIT.

The Lord has well loved man: "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings, so the Lord alone did lead him." "The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath commanded him to be a captain over his people." "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, [then] what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him

A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS,

and hast crowned him with glory and honor!" "I have set the Lord before me. Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved." "Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." "I have been young, and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night." "For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told." "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." "He giveth his beloved sleep." "A man's heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps." "One event happeneth to them all." "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall turn unto God who gave it."

We perceive, upon a glance at this broad subject, that a book would be better fitted to its treatment than a chapter, and yet a chapter alone will aid in attuning the mind to the nobility of our destiny. A single thought entering the mind at the right time will turn the current of a life. Let us elevate and strengthen our present into the nobler foundation of a happier future on earth and a blissful eternity in heaven. We are endowed with shame. Let it keep us from meriting the stinging epigram: "God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man."

WOMAN.

She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight.

And now I see, with eye serene,
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveler betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warm, to comfort, and command
And yet a spirit still, and bright,
With something of an angel light.--Wordsworth.

"Man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of the man," says the great Book. This is so true that most of the charities and mercies for which mankind gets credit in his own moral intelligence are inspired by the charitable and merciful attributes so characteristic of true womanhood. Campbell, in the "Pleasures of Hope," speaks thus of the Garden of Paradise:

The world was sad--the garden was a wild,
And man, the hermit, sighed, till woman smiled.

And lovely woman has smiled forever. Into the lot of life she has put all that has endeared it or made it tolerable; into the hope of the hereafter she has ever breathed the breath of life and kept it a living force. Besides the charms she has for man as a thing of superexcellent beauty, woman has ever held him in the second greatest debt he owes. She teaches him, not less, a greater debt (to God), and brings him before that Chief Creditor with little thought of her own dues. Upon

A SUBJECT SO PLEASANT TO MAN,

it is not strange that he has spent his days in framing speeches to reward the admirable devotion of woman, and it is pleasant to believe the object of those encomiums has received them as the most desirable form of remuneration. She has listened to his praise with beating heart, and blossomed into greater loveliness. She has had no greed of money, save as it would array her in beauteous raiment, that she might better guard the love she has won; she has had little ambition, save as she might be of service to her mate, whose unquiet soul has never ceased its

PLUNGING INTO THE NIGHT OF DESTINY,

the storm of life. But she has had great powers of love, great powers of sacrifice, great depths of forgiveness, great fountains of tears--those still waters where bathes the human soul and rises clean before God's sight. "Women are the poetry of the world, in the same sense that the stars are the poetry of heaven," says Hargrave; "clear, light-giving, harmonious, they are the terrestrial planets that rule the destinies of mankind." "Man," says Washington Irving, "is the creature of interest and ambition. His nature leads him forth into the struggle and bustle of the world. Love is but the embellishment of his early life, or a song piped in the intervals of his acts. But a woman's whole life is

A HISTORY OF THE AFFECTIONS

the heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure, she embarks her whole soul in the traffic of affection; and, if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless, for it is a bankruptcy of the heart." "O, if the loving, closed heart of a good woman," cries Jean Paul Richter, "Should open before man, how much controlled tenderness, how many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues, would he see reposing therein!" "Honor to women!" sings his brother-countryman,

SCHILLER;

"they twine and weave the roses of heaven into the life of men; it is they that unite us in the fascinating bonds of love; and, concealed in the modest veil of the graces, they cherish carefully the external fire of delicate feeling with holy hands." "Win her and wear her, if you can," says Shelley; "she is the most delightful of God's creatures--Heaven's best gift--man's joy and pride in prosperity--man's support and comforter in affliction." "Her passions are made of the finest parts of pure love," says Shakspeare. "Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears," says Rousseau. "She was

LAST AT THE CROSS, EARLIEST AT THE GRAVE,"

says Barrett. "Her errors spring almost always from her faith in the good or her confidence in the true" declares Balzac. "She has more strength in her looks than we have in our laws, and more power by her tears than we have by our arguments," says the Duke of Halifax, a great statesman. "All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of woman," says Voltaire, skeptic in all else. "Women in their nature are much more gay and joyous than men," writes Addison, "whether it be that their blood is more refined, their fibers more delicate, and their animal spirits more light and volatile; or whether, as some have imagined, there may not be a kind of

SEX IN THE VERY SOUL,

I shall not pretend to determine." "It is not strange to me" says Boyle, a good, sensible man, "that persons of the fairer sex should like, in all things about them, that handsomeness for which they find themselves most liked." Man reviles woman for her vanity. At the same time it is the particular delight of the man who will himself wear no decoration to load upon his willing wife the trinkets of his fancy as far as his purse will pay for them. Without woman's almost savage love of display, man would be robbed of nearly all the pleasure which

PERSONAL ORNAMENTS

now give him. He loves woman, just as she is. Just as she is she is much above the level of the thing he would love had he not her to claim his rapt attention. Man smiles at woman's weaknesses, but if he thought of his great meanness of soul when his mercy and fidelity are in the scale against her own, he would look grave and troubled. She dresses with expense and variety, because it is the first ordinance of her master. Her very love of dress is the sign and seal of her intelligence. If it be folly, arraign man at the dock! Says

STAID OLD DR. JOHNSON:

"We see women universally jealous of the reputation of their beauty, and frequently look with contempt on the care with which they study their complexions, endeavor to preserve or supply the bloom of youth, regulate every ornament, twist their hair into curls, and shade their faces from the weather. We recommend the care of their nobler part, and tell them how little addition is made by all their arts to the graces of the mind. But when was it known that female goodness or knowledge was able to attract that officiousness, or inspire that ardor, which beauty produces wherever it appears? And with what hope can we endeavor to persuade the ladies that

THE TIME SPENT AT THE TOILET

is lost in vanity, when they have every moment some new conviction that their interest is more effectually promoted by a ribbon well disposed than by the brightest act of heroic virtue?" Listen to the praise of practical John Ledyard, whose word has the solid ring of fact about it: "I have observed among all nations [that he had seen, the statement not being applicable to a majority of the savages] that the women ornament themselves more than the men; that,

WHEREVER FOUND, THEY ARE THE MOST CIVIL,

kind, obliging, humane, tender beings; that they are ever inclined to be gay and cheerful, timorous and modest. They do not hesitate, like man, to perform a hospitable or generous action; not haughty, nor arrogant, nor supercilious, but full of courtesy and fond of society; industrious, economical, ingenuous; more liable, in general, to err than man; but, in general, also more virtuous, and performing more good actions than he. I never addressed myself in the language of decency and friendship to a woman, whether civilized or savage, without receiving

A DECENT AND FRIENDLY ANSWER.

With men it has often been otherwise. In wandering over the plains of inhospitable Denmark, through honest Sweden, frozen Lapland, rude and churlish Finland, unprincipled Russia, and the widespread regions of the wandering Tartar, if hungry, dry, cold, wet, or sick, woman has ever been friendly to me, and uniformly so: and, to add to this virtue, so worthy of the appellation of benevolence, these actions have been performed in so free and so kind a manner, that, if I was dry, I drank the sweet draught, and, if hungry, ate the coarse morsel with a double relish." Woman may read

THIS CANDID TESTIMONY

with a blush of gratification, for there breathes no flattery in it--only the serious observations of an old man bent on getting knowledge by personal experience. "A man may flatter himself as he pleases," says Sir Richard Steele, "but he will find that the women have more understanding in their own affairs than we have." Man suffers in his loves for woman. She often casts him on the rocks like an angry unfeeling sea, but when, at last she has smiled upon him, he becomes a broader, better man. Without the companionship of woman, man is truly half-made up. He loses his self-esteem, he lives without laws, without churches, without hospitals.

THE WESTERN WILDS,

during the early period of their settlement by Americans, have furnished us with accurate views of society without women. And what has that society been? More a den of wild beasts than a congregation of the most reasoning of God's creatures! There we find men living in constant suspicion of their comrades, in constant danger of hazarding their lives for some sentimental canon of personal vanity that, if they were boys in civilized society, would be flogged out of their moral code.

THE WHOLE HISTORY OF HUMAN SICKNESS

is a continuous outcry of the goodness of woman. Wherever the red hand of war has risen to smite, there the white hand of woman has hastened to soothe. After the roar of the conflagration and amidst the ruins piled up by the earthquake ever has that sweet minister sought out the hungry and succored the suffering.

CRITICISM OUT OF PLACE.

One does not feel that he can do any good by criticising woman. We love fruit that is perfect. We do not describe, and we would have little thanks for a description of, those specimens of cherries, strawberries, or grapes which fail to realize our anticipations of a delightful product of the orchard, the garden, or the vineyard. But I have perhaps, by showing the respect in which men of intellect and honor hold a good woman, given needed encouragement to patient hearts, and testified my own humble regard for womanhood.

FATHER.

His hair just grizzled,
As in a green old age.--Dryden.

The word _papa_, I believe, goes back, just as it is, through all the languages, to the Sanscrit, and even beyond to the unknown Aryan, the stock of our civilized tongues. The Pope is _papa_, kind father, in Italian. How his name ever came to be twisted into the ugly sound we hear in English is a problem, for the difference on the feelings between the sounds of Pope, and _papa_, kind father, cannot well be exaggerated. The kind father of a good man occupies an enviable place in that man's thoughts. It is no passing admiration; that father is no hero of to-day no study of to-morrow, no dim recollection when the future shall have come--but an active exemplar, an honored memory, a potent spur and stay combined--a spur to urge to all a man should do; a stay to curb unwisdom's flying feet. That father has toiled in weariness that his son might follow an easier path of life. Perhaps you now tread that path. How carefully should your steps be taken; how earnestly you should climb to reach the round which meets your self-denying parent's gaze! With him there have come few paroxysms of delight in his labor. He has not been endowed with that mysterious joy your mother has felt in all your existence. He has delighted in you because he hoped you would bring honor to his house; he would rather you had not lived than to see you in a prisoner's cell--far rather. This could not be said of your mother. She would be contented that you had lived at all, that you had looked into her eyes and laughed. Your father has taken care of you, dutifully. Repay him in kindness. "Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." This was graven by the Lord in the marble tablets on Sinai, and has been in turn graven on the countless millions of hearts that have beaten "their short funeral marches" since that awful hour.

ALL SOCIETY

has at one time or another rested on the sustaining power of the father. The patriarch, in ancient times, protected and sustained his dependents, and, in return, received their entire allegiance, wielding over them the power of life and death, and thus initiating the first form of human government. Next came the cities where the government was formed by all the fathers together in council, and our village and city legislators are, to this day, called "the city fathers," although the reverence in which so august a body was once held has departed with the silent flight of the dignity of our modern convocations. Some one has said of

A FINE AND HONORABLE OLD MAN,

that he is in the childhood of immortality. "One's age should be tranquil," says Dr. Arnold, "as one's childhood should be playful; hard work at either extremity of human existence, seems to me out of place; the morning and the evening should be alike cool and peaceful; at midday the sun may burn, and men may labor under it." See to it, if it be within your power, that your father has the rest due to the evening of his days. Let him sit in the cool. Let him listen to the voices of his night--the crickets that cry out his mortality and the nightingales that sing of Paradise!

"GRAY HAIRS

seem to fancy," says Richter, "like the light of a soft moon silvering over the evening of life." "Old age," says Madame Swetchine, "is not one of the beauties of creation, but it is one of its harmonies. The law of contrasts is one of the laws of beauty. Shadows give light its worth; sternness enchances mildness; solemnity splendor."

EXPERIENCE.

"Old age was naturally more honored," says Joubert, "in times when people could not know much more than what they had seen." There are still many avenues of learning in which practical experience seems to be paramount in value. In business its great worth is never underestimated. You have heard of the partnership built on a contribution by one firm-member of the money, and by the other of the experience; and of the dissolution of that firm, leaving the one who put in the money with all the experience, and the one who put in the experience with all the money! The practices of law and medicine are famous for the need of age, which they harness anew with the labors and exertions ordinarily demanded of youth. "Tell me," says Shakerly Marmion, "what you find better or more honorable than age. Is not wisdom entailed upon it?

TAKE THE PRE-EMINENCE OF IT IN EVERYTHING--

in an old friend, in old wine, in an old pedigree." "I venerate old age," says the great and good poet Longfellow; "and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding." "It is only necessary to grow old to become more indulgent," writes Goethe; "I see no fault committed that I have not committed myself." "An aged Christian," says Chapin, beautifully enlarging on Goldsmith's and Dr. Donne's ideas, "with the snow of time on his head, may remind us that those points of earth are whitest which are nearest heaven."

"Age is the outer shore against which dashes an eternity." Page 401.]

"LIKE A MORNING DREAM,"

again says Richter, "life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end." "Time has laid his hand upon my heart gently," says Longfellow, "not smiting it; but

AS A HARPER LAYS HIS OPEN PALM

upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations." "I think that to have known one good old man," George William Curtis says, "one man who, through the chances and mischances of a long life, has carried his heart in his hand, like a palm branch, waving all discords into peace--helps our faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other more than many sermons." "He that would pass the declining years of his life with honor and comfort," says Addison, with fine opposition, "should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young." On the principle that blessings brighten as they take their flight we come to love the sunshine and the birds and all God's glorious works just as we grow old.

"IF WE NEVER CARED FOR LITTLE CHILDREN BEFORE"

says Lord Lytton, "we delight to see them roll on the grass over which we hobble. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, care-worn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn, and feel most delight in the returning spring." "Winter," says Richter, "which strips the leaves from around us, makes us see the distant regions they formerly concealed; so does old age rob us of our enjoyments, only to enlarge the prospect of eternity before us." Seneca says that there is nothing more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to produce as a proof that he has lived long except his years. I love Longfellow's picture of

THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH,

the mighty man. It has been set to one of the best musical accompaniments that I have ever heard. When the verses below are reached, the key is changed to one where the sadness intensifies, until the honest old heart hears the "mother's voice singing in Paradise:"

He goes on Sunday to the church;
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter's voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
Singing in Paradise;
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.

I wish, instead of merely printing these simple words, I could breathe them out to you, as some great tenor or baritone like Sims Reeves or Santley sings them--there is such a world of human life and feeling hidden there, ready to spring forth with the touch of sympathetic sounds!

NOTHING BECOMES A YOUNG MAN SO MUCH

as a respectful demeanor toward a reverend man. Nothing lowers a man so much as flippant speech concerning his elders. The young man with the most dignity has the most deference for age. He takes sincere delight in bowing before ripe years and wisdom. Alas! how sad that ever age should come to one who is not fitted for its honors!

I have known a son to thwart every dream of his father. I have seen the parent, struggling with adversity, yet succeed in opening before the child a career of honor and comfort; and I have seen the son clutch those opportunities as a highwayman seizes upon the wayfarer, and throttle them in the dust and ashes of failure and disgrace. How sad the picture!

A BRIGHTER VIEW.

I have seen a parent toil for years, carrying to his cottage the wages which should support his son in seven long years of careful education. I have watched that son in his ceaseless studies and found he thought only of gladdening his father's heart. I have seen him graduate second in a class of one hundred and fifteen, and then after two years of additional study, first in a body of eighty young men, each of whom was a scholar. The best men of a great city have given that young man encouragement. Their homes and their wives and their daughters have smiled at his approach, and his course has been upward without a fall, and with few pauses for rest. Has he forgotten his poor father? No. He still lives in the cottage, and will make the small house with a great man in it more hospitable and more honorable than a wide door that swings open to a narrow soul. How pleasant the picture!

MOTHER.

A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.--Coleridge.

Not learned save in gracious household ways,
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
In angel instincts, breathing Paradise.

Who looked all native to her place, and yet
On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved,
And girdled her with music. Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood.--Tennyson.

So high and holy a title as mother cannot fall too reverently from man's lips. That he might live the mother has gone down into the valley of the shadow of death; that he might thrive she has fed him with willingness from her own weak body, and grown spectre-like as he grew strong and importunate; that he might go among his fellows on an equal footing, she has toiled with his small weak brain teaching him the beginning of his education and tilling "a rank unweeded garden;" that he might have everlasting life, she has instilled into his mind that saving fear of God, which, though he think himself an atheist, will claim the mastery when Death grins by his couch, and grant him a stay of the awful judgment till he may make his peace with a Creator whose mercy endureth forever. Everything a man is he can owe but to his mother; everything he may be in future life has possibly come from her fond intercession, her gentle admonitions. "Unhappy is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable," says Richter. "The future destiny of the child,"

SAYS NAPOLEON,

"is always the work of the mother," and it is certain that he had ample reason in his own remarkable career for making this important admission. He inherited from his mother all those attributes which made him great, and owed his sudden downfall to none of her teachings. She was noted for her sagacity and prudence, but possibly it required more than human sagacity and prudence to balance the mighty impulses which moved Napoleon Bonaparte. "A father may turn his back on his child," says Washington Irving, "brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands; but a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still

SHE REMEMBERS THE INFANT SMILES

that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy." "There is in all this cold and hollow world," says Mrs. Hemans, "no fount of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within a mother's heart." "Even He that died for us upon the cross," says Longfellow, "in the last hour, in the unutterable agony of death, was mindful of his mother, as if to teach us that this holy love should be our last worldly thought--the last point of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven." Who ever saw

A MOTHER ROMPING WITH HER THREE-YEAR-OLD

that did not look upon her as one of the happiest, therefore, necessarily, one of the best of God's creatures? O, in that peek-a-boo, that capturing of that last squealing "pig," the little toe, that paddy-cake opera, is there not the one great bliss of life, to be happy in making others happy? And how the laughter rings through the house! And then the toil and self-denial for the stocking and the tree

AT CHRISTMAS!

Is it any wonder that the child is so easily deceived, and credits all his joys to unseen ministers? It would not be hard to convince the philosopher himself of the dual earthly character of the mother, visibly a woman, invisibly but not the less really to her child, an ethereal spirit of mercy and goodness! What gnaws her cheek and cheats Death into the belief a flag of truce summons him to the final parley? Has not her babe, her hope, been fevered and in pain, and should she sleep lest it should leave her on this world behind, that then would need her not? "Canst bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades?" No more can her anxiety be

FETTERED INTO SLEEP;

no more can her quick ear be deafened to the little wail that echoes pitiful within the chambers of her heart! When we remember the great passion of motherhood, the intensity of the drama, the prolongation into years of its deep interplots, we cannot marvel longer at the perennial, lasting character of the mother's love. Given, the marvel, there is no further marvel. Given life, the scientists say, there is no other problem on this narrow world. And thus the marvel and the mystery never grow less.

MAN ENTERS THE WORLD,

of all animals the most pitiable and weakly. Left to himself he would immediately perish. Extinguish the mother's love and he would at once perish. His growth is by far the slowest of that of all animals, therefore the wisdom of God in so lengthening the tenure of the mother's solicitude. The mighty man who wields the iron halberd which no two people can lift was still a helpless infant, unable to put his own chubby fist into his own mouth! The autocrat who sweeps whole communities into Siberia with a stroke of his pen was ill when his mother was alarmed, was in agony when she was indiscreet with her food! She cannot forget this. It is but yesterday she dried his flesh to keep it sound. It is but yesterday she let him bite his aching gum upon her finger, wishing the ache might go from him to her--hoping that if he gave her pain he would have less. One can well pardon the vanity that would lead a son to insist that his mother should accompany him to

THE EXECUTIVE MANSION OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC,

that she might behold him enter upon the Chief Magistracy of fifty millions of freemen, gained by the first choice of a majority of those freemen, yea, by the unanimous first and second choice, for none so ready to fight for his right to rule as he who yesterday voted for an honored opponent--the very summit of true political ambition--the apex of the mother's boldest hope! "The mother's love is indeed the golden link that binds youth to old age," says Bovee; "and he is still but a child, however time may have furrowed his cheek, or silvered his brow, who can yet recall, with a softened heart, the fond devotion, or the gentle chidings, of

THE BEST FRIEND

that God ever gives us!" I knew an aged woman, who interested me very greatly in tales of "her boy"--that good son who had so often proven his gratitude for her long love. One day, chancing to consider her great number of years, I inquired how old "her boy" was, and found that he had been a grandfather for twenty-three years, and had lately had the satisfaction of holding a great grandson in his arms. Still he was her curly haired-boy--she could remember him in no other condition of life with so much satisfaction.

"I WOULD DESIRE FOR A FRIEND,"

says Lacretelle, "the son who never resisted the tears of his mother." "Love droops, youth fades, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's secret hope outlives them all," sings Oliver Wendell Holmes. "At first," says Beecher, "babies feed on the mother's bosom, but always on her heart." "Stories first heard at a mother's knee," affirms Ruffini, "are never wholly forgotten--a little spring that never quite dries up in our journey through scorching years."

"AN OUNCE OF MOTHER,"

says the Spanish proverb, "is a pound of clergy." "The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom," says another writer. "Men are what their mothers made them," says Emerson, in study of Napoleon's idea; "you may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber." "It is generally admitted," says Theodore Hook, "and frequently proved, that virtue and genius, and all the natural good qualities which men possess, are derived from their mothers." "It is well for us," says Bishop Hare, "that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with

A CONCEIT OF OUR OWN IMPORTANCE

which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it." Perhaps the praises of our mothers tarry in our brains too long anyway. It may be a provision of nature that woman shall inspire her child with sufficient self-esteem to take him through the world with a first-class ticket, a cabin passage, that he may escape the poor accommodations of excessive humility, the steerage of the ship of life. It seems incredible that our mother was mistaken in thinking her boys the brightest, best, and most creditable in all the region roundabout! Let us by our lives, marvel rather at the correctness of her vision than the blindness of her love.

"SHE WHO HAS LOST AN INFANT,"

says Leigh Hunt, "is never, as it were, without an infant child. Her other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality; but this one alone is rendered an immortal child; for death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence." The mother teaches us the one grand lesson of

UNALTERABLE FIDELITY.

"Nothing is more noble," says Cicero, "nothing more venerable." One of the most beautiful tributes to an aged mother was written by Lamartine. "The loss of a mother," he says "is always severely felt. Even though her health may incapacitate her from taking an active part in the care of her family, still she is a sweet rallying-point, around which affection and obedience, and a thousand endeavors to please, concentrate; and dreary is the blank when such a point is withdrawn! It is like that lonely star before us; neither its heat nor light are anything to us in themselves; yet the shepherd would feel his heart sad if he missed it when he lifts his eye to the brow of the mountain over which it rises when the sun descends."

THERE ARE MEN WHO FORGET THE CLAIMS

their mothers have upon them. Of such ungrateful wretches, though clothed in outward excellences, the pen can write nothing too harsh in justice. As old Dr. South says, "the greatest favors are to such a one but the motion of a ship upon the waves; they leave no trace, no sign behind them. All kindness descend as showers of rain or rivers of fresh water falling into the main sea; the sea swallows them all, but is not all changed or sweetened by them. If you look backward and trace him up to his original, you will find that he was born so; and if you look forward enough, it is a thousand to one that you will find that

HE ALSO DIES SO.

The thread that nature spins is seldom broken off by anything but death. I do not by this limit the operation of God's grace, for that may do wonders." Be glad, if you are ungrateful, that a wise man has given you so good counsel to pray--and pray as you do when you think yourself in extreme peril!

IF YOUR MOTHER IS YET YOUNG,

you have many years of her great friendship before you. Try and pattern after her boundless affection. Let it melt into your heart and make it warmer. If "age has snowed white hairs" upon her head, treasure her the more fondly during the few swift years she will be left to you. Soon she will go to her reward, and you will be without the only friend of man whose love seems to be inalienable--whose esteem he cannot barter away, either in greed or in vice.

THE MOTHER OF MOTHERS.

In almost every community there is "a mother in Israel," a mother of mothers, whose great heart is like the ocean, and claims the outpourings of every stream of life. To these grand souls of virtue and goodness let every man bow in reverence, for they are mothers to the motherless. When the Reaper came forth to reap he aimed to take the richest sheaf, but lo! the mother in Israel gathered the orphans together, and poured out her tenderness upon them.

LOVE.

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted!--Burns.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those for others; deep as love.
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life! the days that are no more.--Tennyson.

Love, says Cowley, "is a great passion, and therefore I hope I have done with it." I think most people will agree with this sentiment. Love is such a tyrant, it leaves common sense so little to say, that the majority of people are heartily glad when reason returns to her throne and the thrilling lunacy is a remembrance instead of a fact. The remembrance is sweet, and has no angry thorn, no peremptory mandate. The young man is going along in the full enjoyment of his life, when suddenly a huge coiled spring, the existence of which has not attracted his notice, is loosed in his breast, his whole intellectual forces centre on the attainment of one object, and a mental strain begins which is of the exact nature of madness, and has ever been termed so by people who have looked at things merely by what they have seen. In the highly-feverish state of the brain the nerves of the whole system soon become involved, the stomach refuses to perform its functions, and physical emaciation and deep melancholia rapidly ensue. The obvious reason is the insane state of the brain. Nature has suddenly impressed that organ with the one idea that a certain fair maid is actually without the faults of her associates. She is the prize of the whole world! Had the world the information of her perfections which is lodged in this young man's secret brain, there would be a war of extermination for her possession--a second sack of Troy at the very least. Deep pity for other men with wives, who cannot marry this maiden, and pity for young men who have seemingly preferred other maidens, intermit with joy that all the world has been so blind.

CAUTIOUSLY THE YOUTH ADVANCES

toward his prey. The expedition is one of tremendous importance, therefore his exceeding amount of thought. When he is in the ineffable presence, he is there as an actor in a tragedy, or as a tenor in an opera. He has almost counted his hairs; he certainly counts the winkings of his eyelids! Can any detail be unimportant in an undertaking of such measureless risk? It is no wonder, then, that a young man who is giving as much thought as this to a young, thoughtless girl is not worth much in his business for the time being! In fact, it is a miracle to him, after

SOME DOOMFUL FROWN

from his queen, that he has survived the night and goes to his work at all! He is confident that it is base habit. "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt!" he cries, as his dissatisfied employer, or father, requires some reasonable action and fails to get it. In after-life this same young man is glad the "grand passion" will never come to him again. He feels that it has not heightened him in his own regard. His love may have been smooth or it may have been swallowed in the quicksands of adversity--the difference is small. It is not creditable to the human brain to be so hoodwinked and purblind as Cupid makes his victims. But

LOVE RULES THE UNIVERSE,

having its climax in God himself, and its earthly ideality in the mother's affection. We should not complain that when the potent essence is first administered to us it shakes us seriously. Without this passion, selfishness would triumph, and man would not take on the cares of wedded life. Society and religion would wither. The world would be a howling den of chaos and deep crime.

HOW HAVE THE SAGES LOOKED UPON LOVE?

I think they are inclined to praise it, as a whole--to indorse it merely as a sensation, a passing gratification. It has always, on the contrary, seemed to me like an exquisitely painful means to an exquisitely beautiful end. The warm genial love of the home--the love which is as an open grate, cheerful, and which is without those thunderstorms needful to clear the heavily charged atmosphere of youthful love--pleases and repays me for "the dangers I have passed." "The greatest pleasure of life is love," says Sir William Temple. "Love is like the hunter," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness." This is true of only a minority of the hunters. I have more frequently bought additional fish than thrown away those I have caught. Why? Because the weariness and difficulty of catching two or three rock bass had impressed me with the value of a whole string of fish. You have seen

THE ANXIETY OF THE CAT

to make the captive mouse believe she is not on guard. She walks away with the utmost indifference. But let the mouse so much as move its crushed little body, she is upon it with the ferocity of the greatest members of her agile tribe. So it is with us. Let our possession escape us, our consternation is complete. Again the spring uncoils, and again we are madmen. "A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon than love that would seem hid; love's night is noon," says Shakspeare. "It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all" sings Tennyson. "Nothing but real love," says Lord Lytton, "can repay us for the loss of freedom, the cares and fears of poverty,

THE COLD PITY OF THE WORLD

that we both despise and respect." "Love," says Sir Thomas Overbury, wittily, "is a superstition that doth fear the idol which itself hath made." "To reveal its complacence by gifts," says Mrs. Sigourney, "is one of the native dialects of love." "Love is never so blind as when it is to spy faults," says South. "Love reckons days for years," says Dryden, "and every little absence is an age." "Where love has once obtained an influence," observes Plautus dryly, "any flavoring, I believe, will please." "That is the true reason of love," says Goethe, "when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could either have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us."

"NO CORD OR CABLE CAN DRAW

so forcibly or bind so fast," says melancholy Burton, "as love can do with only a single thread." "Where there exists the most ardent and true love," says Valerius Maximus, "it is often better to be united in death than separated in life." "A man of sense may love like a madman," says Rochefoucauld, "but not like a fool." Says Addison, who was a bachelor, and knew little about the heart: "Ridicule, perhaps, is a better expedient against love than sober advice; and I am of the opinion that Hudibras and Don Quixote may be as effectual to cure the extravagance of this passion as any one of the old philosophers." "Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's," says Richter. This accords with common observation. "It makes us proud when our love of a mistress is returned," says Hazlitt, in a rambling manner; "it ought to make us prouder still when we can love her for herself alone, without the aid of any such selfish reflection. This is the religion of love." All such argument proceeds on the theory that love is a sawing of wood, a digging of potatoes, or some such "emotion," to be entirely controlled by the will and regulated by the decencies. "Loving," says Shakspeare, "goes by haps; some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps." "The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden, in her acceptance of him," says Emerson, again; "she was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star--she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he." I do not think Emerson has got exactly the right idea of the way a lover feels just there. Here it is and nearer the truth--I do not know the author's name:

I've thought, if those dumb, heathen gods could breathe,
As shapeless, strengthless, wooden things they stand,
And feel the holy incense round them wreathe,
And see before them offerings of the land;
And know that unto them is worship paid
From pure hearts, kneeling on the verdant sod,
Looking to helplessness, for light and aid
Because by fate they know no higher god:
How their dull hearts must ache with constant pain,
And sense of shame, and fear to be flung down
When all their weakness must one day be plain,
And fire avenge the undeserved crown.
And reading my love's letter, sad and sweet, I sigh,
Knowing that such a helpless, wooden god am I.

"The comparison of love to fire holds good in one respect," says Henry Home, "that the fiercer it burns the sooner it is extinguished." "Love me little love me long" says Marlowe. "The plainest man, that can convince a woman," says Colton, "that he is really in love with her, has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce there is a silence in it that suspends the foot; and the folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects." "Love is but another name for that inscrutable presence by which the soul is connected with humanity," says Simms. "The beings who appear cold," says Madame Swetchine, "adore where they dare to love." "Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved," says Charles Lamb. "It is possible," says Terence, referring to the unquestionable temporary insanity of the passion, "that a man can be so changed by love that one could not recognize him to be the same person." "Solid love, whose root is virtue, can no more die, than virtue itself," says Erasmus, who was probably talking about a requited affection.

THE CASE OF THE POET PETRARCH,