give color and force to everything it says, just in proportion as our moral perception is healthy or diseased. Should not such truths (and who can question them?) nerve us up to keep that mental perception bright-that inner ear alert and healthy? That moral vision-that "sixth sense," so susceptive of impression from "the true, the beautiful and the good"—should we not keep it chaste and sensitive by vigilance and watching? Every beauty in the sunbeam is an inner beauty-a perception. Every blush on every flower and all the music of the birds, the sublimity of nature, the glory of the landscape; these are moral results instead of physical facts. Their reflections on the inner man are the sources of the pleasure they afford us, and if the mirror is stained, unkept and broken, their pleasures are forever gone. Let me illustrate my thought. In Washington once I walked in the gloaming of the evening through the National Conservatory. Beauty was there in rarest forms. The brightest colors and most delicate tints trembled on the breasts of narcotics from every country on the globe. The twilight deepened, and one by one the tints were fading. This smaller rose was palingand that—and that till finally I could see no beauty anywhere. Why? Had some genii wasted the national flowergarden? Were the roses gone? No. Daylight had gone, and with it every color: not hidden but gone; for color is only present where present light-rays are reflected from a surface. These colors could only live in the sunlight, and when it was absent color was impossible. They were reflected in pictures on my retina. The perception was carried through my optic nerves to the intellect, and when the picture could not be painted there, I lost the pretty sight and the pleasure subsided. So in morals. Let the daylight of God go out. Let in the gloom of discontent. Cease to care for and encourage that inner and yet finer perception-and lo! a dimness, a darkness, like unto which human blindness is a noondayhuman paralysis is activity-will cover the moral man like the gloom of Erebus. Every beauty shall fade from the garden of the heart, and all the music of nature, voiced in the works of God, will die on the sound-waves of an atmosphere where no moral ears shall hear and enjoy it. Sound, so scientists tell us, is the effect of air-waves on the tympanum, and if the ear-drum is palsied there can be no sound. A tree falling in the depths of a forest makes no noise, because there can be no noise when there is no ear to afford it an opportunity to exist. Music in the piano has no being, be the keys never so gracefully touched, unless there be ears that can receive the vibrations which the strings set in motion; just as there can be no odor without an olfactory nerve, no reflection without a mirror, no color without a light. So in the moral world. If we are morally blind we cannot see. If our ears are diseased we cannot appreciate aright the music of the soul immortal. To do his duty to himself, therefore, it becomes every one to keep those perceptions in training-tɔ keep his mind and heart aright if he would enjoy the privileges of life and fill the measure of his destiny. He must cultivate thoughtfulness and indulge in introspection, like the world's single Exemplar, if he would be educated to appreciate his own life and do his duty well. The mental constitution is such as to preclude two subjects of concentrated thought at one time. The mind needs to address itself to individual ideas, analyzing even these into their component elements before it can appreciate them as they demand. Hence the utility of that pattern which history affords us the necessity, amid the whirl and whiz of a thousand things in this day of mental activity and business push, for us now and then to go alone into the home of meditation, and learn in solitude the lessons which only the thoughtful can ever know. Here, and here alone, can one pick his motives to pieces and eliminate the evil they all contain; here leave haste behind him and remember that his fellow is but a man. Oh, the profound metaphysics of the Sermon on the Mount! Here, in solitude-in the quiet closet of the soul -can we hear that still, small voice of conscience, so small, yet so accented and clear, like a fly's footfall on a pane of glass, distinguished only by the microphone, and appreciated but the more on account of its delicate noise. Here and only here, can each one prosecute that earnest work of introspection which alone can cast a light along the path of duty, and guide a man to the profoundest knowledge of life-the knowledge of himself. Another and a greater One found it necessary, and so will we, if ever we reach the goal of human destiny, a well regulated manhood. Habits of solitude and introspection are essential to enable one to do himself justice. Every man is a two-fold being— a social and a solitary one. Here he fits himself for social life, and then in that larger sphere constantly gathers new material for solitude and thought. Observation is the vineyard boy, and meditation makes the wine. In that busy outward world where men move and trade and drive, each gathers the grapes of rich experience, and then in the wine-vat of meditation he goes alone to press the juices out. And now, refreshed and strengthened by the rich viands his labor has afforded him, he joins again the circle of his fellows-buoyant, forcible-ready to impart his own vitality to others, and make all who come into the sunshine of his life feel like they were in the refreshing breath of a summer morning. The wisdom of ages hangs about this thought like a mantle from the shoulders of a prince. Because it has been abused into the idea of a monastery and a quasi holy seclusion, detracts nothing from its gracefulness. Fire is no less a good servant in the grate because it is a cruel master in the attic. Meditation, as much as it is neglected, has a place in the economy of Ethics which nothing else in this life can fill. We owe it to self to enter now and then the precincts of our inner life, and shutting out the world, uncover the faults we fain would think are dead. We know they are but sleep ing with the anesthetic of forgetfulness. Command them that they file in melancholy line before us. Review those failings yet again, till we know them so well as to avoid them hereafter forever. Recuperate thus our wasted strength, and gather up energies strained and shattered, for more courageous effort. By such habits of introspection, we school our inner sight and hearing, lest experience and nature should teach in vain lessons we can never learn-show us beauties we can never see nor hear. There is comfort and strength in the past which the present can never give. I love to live it again, I love to restray the scenes of childhood, and be a boy again. I love to cling about my lamented mother's knee and feel her soft white hand upon my little head, and hear her say again: "My noble boy! God bless my child!" The lips are still that breathed that prayer; but they are living yet, and their memory sends through my soul, like new-born life, fresh currents of courage and hope. There is a power in the past, and God gives men memory to embalm its scenes with something akin to an immortality. Too jealous is He of His omnipotence to squander His feeblest strength, and He interds we should use that power to our good. Be it ours, therefore, to unbolt the rusty locks, swing the door wide open, and enter the chambers of the past. Walk among the shades that stand like sculptured busts along the niches of its broken walls. Count them. Admire them. Breathe into their marble lips new life, and wake in our hearts the latent chords their fingers only can touch, making music we only can hear. Not that their sight should make us melancholy. No. Bitterness is there, and Disappointment, and no smiles of welcome greet us from their stolid unmoved features. Blighted Hope is there, her face all covered with scars, her eyes both out with weeping. Sorrow is there, her sombre shadow falling across the vision of memory, and clouding the present and the future. Mistake is there, her hand pointing wrong. Broken fragments of misguided effort are scattered at her feet. But there is a lamp in every hand along that crumbling wall-a lamp of usefulness, a light of blessing; and through the arches of that ruined roof-above the gloom of its darkest recess-over the gravestones of dead aspirations-its holy sheen is falling like a pencil of sunbeams through the broken windows of that ivy-crowned Temple of the Past. JOVE INVOKED. O Nature, brave and gay, What, while laughing, do you say? Prepare for joy and roses, spring is here! Hence! and woo me not, nymphs of the smiling year, Since one denies her smile, why should I care Whether the effete old world be foul or fair? Swell, downy buds, and blow Balmy winds! with sunny glow Light up the awakening hills, O King of day! Ride on the zephyr's wing. Many, as poets sing, Have died for love. Why cannot I give, too, "Get you gone, you ugly thing, I'll no more of your piping !" O Love, Love, for thee could I lay me down and die! But if I did, a universal fie! Would greet the anachronism huge, and I'd get Reproaches great for bad example set. "Nothing, nothing can be done!" "Nothing, Sir, under the sun." O d-n, O-- I mean O Zeus! O Zeus! didn't you Tie anvils to Juno's heels and in the blue |