difficult to please without loss of sincerity and without stooping to the service of vulgar interests. Not how much or how many things thou knowest is of import. An industrious reader, of retentive memory, will easily know more things than a great philosopher compared with whom he is but a child.

Know thyself was the sum of what Socrates taught, and each of the seven wise men rested his fame upon an apothegm. To expect the multitude to appreciate the best in life or literature, is to expect them to be what they have never been and will probably never be. Would you have an ox admire the sunrise or the pearly dew, when all he feels the need of is grass? Appeal to the many if you will, but if your appeal is for the highest, only the few will hearken.

Consider not what great men or books are worth in themselves, but what they are worth to thee; for thou art able to judge of their value only in so far as thou understandest and lovest them.

If thou canst not bear trouble, sorrow, and disappointment without loss of composure, thou art poorly equipped for life's struggle. If thou mayst not lead the life thou wouldst wish, thou canst at least make the life thou leadest the means to improve thyself. If we were so constituted that thought, feeling, and imagination might have free and healthful play in ever-during darkness and isolation, life would still be good. Could I live surrounded by those I love, I should feel less keenly the discontent which the consciousness of my higher needs creates; and besides, it is not easy to rest in the comforts and luxuries which make and keep us inferior, except in the company of those we love. If our ordinary power of sight were as great as that we gain with the help of the microscope, the world would become for us a place of horrors; and if we could clearly see ourselves as we are, life would be less endurable. God blurs our vision as a mother hides from her child its wound.

Pleasures which quickly end in revulsion of feeling are but momentary escapes from pain; and they alone are fortunate who are able to persevere in pursuits which give them pure delight. "All good," says Kant, "which is not based on the highest moral principle is but empty appearance and splendid misery."

Sensations of color, taste, sound, smell, touch, heat and cold, perceptions of magnitude, and temporal and spatial relations, is the sum of what we know; and yet we are conscious that reason means infinitely more than this, that its proper object is the eternal world of truth, goodness, and beauty. Think for thyself with a single view to truth; for so only will thy thought be of worth and service to others. We feel ourselves only in action, and hence the need of doing lest we lose ourselves and be swallowed in nothingness. And for the old and feeble even worry, I suppose, is a comfort, for it helps to keep this self-consciousness alive. It is impossible to say whence a thought comes, and it is often difficult to determine the occasion by which it has been suggested.

Fortunate are the children all of whose knowledge comes from man and nature in their purity, whose memory holds no words which are not the symbols of what they themselves have seen and felt, in whose minds no will-o'-the-wisp from chimera worlds flits to and fro. It is only by keeping men in ignorance and vice that it is possible to keep them from the contagion of great thoughts. They who have little are thought to have no right to anything. Thus the plagiarized sayings of Napoleon and other nurslings of fame pass for their own; who their real authors were, seeming to be a matter of indifference.

If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am? Should I publish what I believe to be true and well expressed, and competent judges should declare it to be worthless in form and substance, the verdict would be interesting to me, and I should set to work to discover why and how I had so far failed in discernment. "A thoroughly cultivated man," says Fontenelle, "is informed by all the thinkers of the past, as though he had lived and continued to grow in knowledge during all the centuries." The author is rewarded when his readers are made better.

The most persuasive of men are the praisers of patent medicines. Their eloquence is more richly rewarded than that of all the orators, who also are paid, for the most part, in inverse ratio to the amount of truth they utter. Fame, as fame, is the merest vanity. No wise man wishes to be talked and written about, living or dead, to be a theme chiefly for fools.

Literature is writing in which genuine thought and feeling are rightly expressed. They who content themselves with what others have uttered, learn nothing. The blind need a guide, but they who are able to see should look for themselves. There is, indeed, in the words of genius a glow which never dies; but it only dazzles and misleads, if it fails to stimulate and strengthen our own powers of vision. True speech is not idle; it is utterance of life, the mate of action, and the begetter of noble deeds. Strive for knowledge and strength, but do not appear to have them.

"A book," says La Bruyère, "which exalts the mind and inspires high and manly thoughts, is good, and the work of a master." A phrase suffices to tell the man is ignorant or the book worthless. As the body is nourished by dead things, vegetable and animal, so the mind feeds on the thoughts of those who have ceased to live, which, it would seem, are never rightly understood until the thinkers have passed away.

To be unwilling to be proved wrong is to fail in love of truth; to resent an objection is to lack culture. One may believe what cannot be demonstrated, but to grow angry because there is no proof is absurd.

To do deeds and to utter thoughts which long after we have departed shall remain to cheer, to illumine, to strengthen and console, is to be like God; and the desire of noble minds is not of praise, but of abiding power for good.

He who is certain of himself needs not the good opinion of men, not of those even who are competent to judge. Only the vain and foolish or the designing and dishonest will wish to receive credit for more ability and virtue than they have. An exaggerated reputation may nourish conceit or win favor; but the wise and the good put away conceit, and desire not favors which are granted from mistaken notions.

"I hate false words," says Landor, "and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness those that fit the thing."

Dwell not with complacency upon aught thou hast or hast achieved, but address thyself each day, like a simple-hearted child, to the task God sets thee; and remember when the last hour comes thou canst carry nothing to Him but faith in His mercy and goodness.

CHAPTER II.

TRUTH AND LOVE.

Truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.—BACON.

As those who have little think their little much, so those who have few ideas believe with obstinacy that they are the sum of all truth. If the world could but be made to see what they see there would be no ills. They have not even a suspicion of the unutterable complexity of the warp and woof of nature and of life; and when their opinions are combated they imagine they thereby acquire new importance, and they defend them with such zeal that they make proselytes and found sects in religion, politics, and literature. The source of the greater part of error is the absoluteness the mind attributes to its knowledge and, as part of this, the persuasion that at each stage of our mental life, we are capable of seeing things as they are. The aim of the philosopher, as of the Christian, is to