ity the most dangerous bequests to man. And yet the most that can be claimed is that they bring out what is in man, and offer the good as well as bad a chance to declare itself. It is not true, either, as even the genial Stevenson says, that "it is as difficult to be generous on $30,000 a year as on $1000 a year." The man who can barely make both ends meet in the struggle for daily life has no resource but to smother every generous impulse within him. The fact is, that it is impossible to say what a man's true character, taste or ability may be, until a fair measure of wealth has given him freedom and opportunity for self-expression. Let such opportunity become general, and it might turn out, as Fenelon long since told us, that "we are all inspired, but our mode of life stifles it."

THE MODERN DEMAND FOR THE VIRTUE OF

CHEERFULNESS

W

HERE is the Milton who would venture to put forth an ode to melancholy in these days? An ode to mirth is the demand of the hour. "Sadness as inseparably connected with the sublime" is a poetic principle that no new Poe is born to proclaim. The sweetness of music that the minor key closes floats faint and far beneath the jubilante which the clamorous world now demands of its singers. What this may have to do with that loss of all great harpers, which the higher critics lament, the poets must consider for themselves. But in the humbler ranks of life and talent there seem to be losses entailed by the festive demands to which the jovial masters of the feast are not wholly alive. It is something kin in rather reversed fashion to the situation of the old-time reveler at the prohibition banquet of to-day, as his toast gives it:

Here's to a temperance supper,
With water in glasses tall,
And coffee and tea to end with--
And me not there at all.

The glad song and the glad countenance and even the glad hand still leave so much of the real absent that the establishment of man's truest relations and friendships upon the basis of them somehow misses fulfillment. They lack something of that touch of nature which belongs to human frailties and susceptibilities to pain and lapses, that no

amount of Christian or any other science can quite do away with. The stern effort to deny them in ourselves or ignore them in our next friends acts something like the cup of cold water at the feast or an icy veil of concealment through which the warmest sympathies of the soul can not penetrate.

It may be true enough that the divinest sympathy will declare itself along the line of the glad hosannas when we shall become as the angels, or even the good and trusting humans that we ought to be. But while the shades of the prison house cling about us and make pitfalls for our steps and graves for our loved ones, it does not seem strange that even the Master himself forgot the glory that was revealed to weep at the tomb of Lazarus, or groan in spirit over the sins and sufferings of a wandering world. Unquestionably, it was the tenderness of a sympathy born of this recognition that knit him so closely in ties of love and friendship to the weeping sisters, Martha and Mary.

It is a truth which any one may test for himself that, whatever pæons may be sung to the cheerful friend, it is the one who turns to you in sorrow that most stirs the deeps of tenderness, sympathy and affection in the soul.

There is a chill, therefore, in any philosophy which meets the troubles and sorrows of an imperfect world with the calm claim that they are nonexistent. It well justifies the recent sage reflection that "heights of philosophy are good places on which to freeze." But more than that, it misses the true height and depth of human philosophy which ever takes into account the finite mysteries, the tears in things and the inevitable sadness that springs from what is best and greatest in man himself. Carlyle recognizes this when he says, "Man's unhappiness comes in part from his great

A later than Carlyle, in the teeth of all the present pro

test, gives man permission to admit his ills and even turn them to account in the world. "Why should we wish to conceal the fact that we have suffered, that we suffer, that we are likely to suffer to the end?" says Benson, who strikes almost the Miltonic note in the "Sable Goddess" behalf. "There is a significance in suffering. It is not all a clumsy error, a well-meaning blunder. It is a deliberate part of the constitution of the world." To wisely weigh our sorrow with our comfort, he holds, with Shakespeare, the logical course. And for those who scorn such concession to "selfasserted ills," he comes back with yet finer scorn in his own gentle and inimitable fashion: "My belief is this," he writes:

"As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow. I see that many people find the world dreary, some find it interesting, some surprising, some find it entirely satisfactory. But those who find it satisfactory seem to me as a rule to be natures who do not trouble their heads very much about other people, but go cheerfully and optimistically on their way, closing their eyes as far as possible to things painful and sorrowful." "Well, to speak very sincerely and humbly, such a life," he adds, "seems to me the worst kind of a failure." And as to the call for happiness everywhere, he writes: "The only happiness worth seeking for is a happiness which takes all these dark things—in the track of suffering and the most sorrowful mystery of deathinto account, looks them in the face, reads the secret of their dim eyes and set lips, dwells with them and learns to be tranquil in their presence."

Faith and philosophy may soothe in time, but they can not do away with the reality of our pains and losses. The very science which proposes to do this for us in many respects only bewilders. It is as Benson says: "More and

more we feel the impenetrability of the mystery that surrounds us; the discoveries of science, instead of raising the veil, seem only to make the problem more complex, more bizarre, more insoluble." The form of so-called science, which takes refuge in denials and assertions back of experience, though commendably enough reaching out to the mind of God for illumination, in no way clears up the problem which the claims of infinite love and infinite power bring to the entrance of so much that is not love into the scheme of being. To trace it to "a misunderstanding of the truth of being," is only to push the question a step farther back and leave the finite mind still pondering why the truth of being was not made clear to it at the outset. Aye, and who is to be trusted to make it clear now?

Only I discern

Infinite passion and the pain
of finite hearts that yearn,

says Browning, and the wisest of our teachers do not seem to discern much more. To grant us some hours of sadness, and some hearts to come closer for the sympathy in it, is therefore a part of our human heritage which should not be taken from us. Since man was made a little lower than the angels, some sympathy with dust as well as deity seems essential for that perfect understanding which is the basis of perfect love anywhere.

"The trouble with perfect people," says a scornful Philistine, "is that they expect too much of their friends. They demand that you shall be as good as they, and good in the same way, otherwise they throw you into the Irish Sea." The friend who will take us as we are and not demand, like the photographers, that we shall look pleasant despite all that nature and time may be doing to prevent it, is the one