The

This sensibility appears in the homage to beauty which exalts the faculties of youth, in the power which form and color exert upon the soul; when we see eyes that are a compliment to the human race, features that explain the Phidian sculpture. Fontenelle said: "There are three things about which I have curiosity, though I know nothing of them, music, poetry, and love." The The great doctors of this science are the greatest men, - Dante, Petrarch, Michel Angelo, and Shakspeare. wise Socrates treats this matter with a certain archness, yet with very marked expressions. "I am always,” he says, " asserting that I happen to know, I may say, nothing but a mere trifle, relating to matters of love; yet in that kind of learning I lay claim to being more skilled than any one man of the past or present time." They may well speak in this uncertain manner of their knowledge, and in this confident manner of their will, for the secret of it is hard to detect, so deep it is; and yet genius is measured by its skill in this science.

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Who is he in youth, or in maturity, or even in old age, who does not like to hear of those sensi bilities which turn curled heads round at church, and send wonderful eye-beams across assemblies, from one to one, never missing in the thickest crowd. The keen statist reckons by tens and hundreds; the genial man is interested in every slipper that comes into the assembly. The passion, alike

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everywhere, creeps under the snows of Scandinavia,
under the fires of the equator, and swims in the
seas of Polynesia. Lofn is as puissant a divinity in
the Norse Edda as Camadeva in the red vault of
India, Eros in the Greek, or Cupid in the Latin
heaven. And what is specially true of love is, that
it is a state of extreme impressionability; the lover
has more senses and finer senses than others; his
eye and ear are telegraphs; he reads omens on the
flower, and cloud, and face, and form, and gesture,
and reads them aright. In his surprise at the sud-
den and entire understanding that is between him
and the beloved person, it occurs to him that they
might somehow meet independently of time and
place. How delicious the belief that he could elude
all guards, precautions, ceremonies, means, and de-
lays, and hold instant and sempiternal communica-
tion! In solitude, in banishment, the hope returned,
and the experiment was eagerly tried. The supernal
What was on his
powers seem to take his part.
lips to say is uttered by his friend.

When he went

abroad, he met, by wonderful casualties, the one person he sought. If in his walk he chanced to look back, his friend was walking behind him. And it has happened that the artist has often drawn in his pictures the face of the future wife whom he had not yet seen.

But also in complacences, nowise so strict as this of the passion, the man of sensibility counts it a

delight only to hear a child's voice fully addressed to him, or to see the beautiful manners of the youth of either sex. When the event is past and remote, how insignificant the greatest compared with the piquancy of the present! To-day at the school examination the professor interrogates Sylvina in the history class about Odoacer and Alaric. Sylvina can't remember, but suggests that Odoacer was defeated; and the professor tartly replies, "No, he defeated the Romans." But 't is plain to the visitor, that 't is of no importance at all about Odoacer, and 't is a great deal of importance about Sylvina; and if she says he was defeated, why he had better, a great deal, have been defeated, than give her a moment's annoy. Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentleman in him, would have said, Let me be defeated a thousand times.

And as our tenderness for youth and beauty gives a new and just importance to their fresh and manifold claims, so the like sensibility gives welcome to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for merit in corners. An Englishman of marked character and talent, who had brought with him hither one or two friends and a library of mystics, assured me that nobody and nothing of possible interest was left in England, he had brought all that was alive away, I was forced to reply: "No, next door to you, probably, on the other side of the partition in the same house, was a greater man than any you had seen.

Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him. Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto to his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life,— to add to our high acquaintances. The very law of averages might have assured you that there will +8 be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads. Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. 'Tis a secret, the genesis of either; but the springs of justice and courage do not fail any more than salt or sulphur springs.

・

The world is always opulent, the oracles are never silent; but the receiver must by a happy temperance be brought to that top of condition, that frolic health, that he can easily take and give these fine communications. Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness, an open and noble temper. There was never poet who had not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil, wrote,—

"Oft have I heard, and deem the witness true,

Whom man delights in, God delights in too."

All beauty warme the heart, is a sign of health, prosperity, and the favor of God. Everything lasting and fit for men, the Divine Power has marked with this stamp. What delights, what emancipates, not what scares and pains us, is wise

and good in speech and in the arts. For, truly, the heart at the centre of the universe with every throb hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, vein, and veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy. The plenty of the poorest place is too great: the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound ends in music. The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays.

em

One more trait of true success. The good mind chooses what is positive, what is advancing, braces the affirmative. Our system is one of poverty. 'Tis presumed, as I said, there is but one Shakspeare, one Homer, one Jesus, not that all are or shall be inspired. But we must begin by affirming. Truth and goodness subsist forevermore. . It is true there is evil and good, night and day: but these are not equal.. The day is great and final. The night is for the day, but the day is not for the night.. What is this immortal demand for more, which belongs to our constitution? this enormous ideal? There is no such critic and beggar as this terrible Soul. No historical person begins to content We know the satisfactoriness of justice, the sufficiency of truth. We know the answer that

us.

leaves nothing to ask. We know the Spirit by its victorious tone. The searching tests to apply to every new pretender are amount and quality,what does he add? and what is the state of mind he leaves me in? Your theory is unimportant; but