a
fearful rate, right up against all his nobly-built hopes and projects,
making a complete wreck of them. May God help him then! But must his
being ever after be like the lonely Polar Sea on which no bark was ever
launched?

But surely we have troubles enough without borrowing from the future or
the past, as we constantly do. It is often said, it is a good thing that
we can't look into the future. One would think that that mysterious
future, on which we are the next moment to enter, in which we are to
live our everyday life--one would think it a store-house of evils. Do
you expect no good--are there for you no treasures there?

How often life has been likened to a journey, a pilgrimage, with its
deserts to cross, its mountains to climb!... The road to---- Lake,
distant from my home some eight or ten miles, partly lies through a
mountain pass. You drive a few miles--and a beautiful drive it is, with
its pines and hemlocks, their dark foliage contrasting with the blue
sky--on either hand high mountains; now at your left, then at your
right, and again at your left runs now swiftly over stones, now
lingering in hollows, making good fishing-places, a creek, that has come
many glad miles on its way to the river. But how are you to get over
that mountain just before you? Your horse can't draw you up its rocky,
perpendicular front! Never mind, drive along--there, the mountain is
behind you--the road has wound around it. Thus it is with many a
mountain difficulty in our way, we never have it to climb. There is now
and then one, though, that we do have to climb, and we can't be drawn or
carried up by a faithful nag, but our weary feet must toil up its steep
and rugged side. But many a pilgrim before us has climbed it, and we
will not faint on the way. 'What man has done, man may do.' ... Yet,
till I have found out to a certainty, I never will be sure that the
mountain that seemingly blocks up my way, _has not a path winding round
it_.

Then the past.... Some one says we are happier our whole life for having
spent one pleasant day. Keats says: 'A thing of beauty is a joy
_forever_.' I believe this: to me the least enjoyment has been like a
grain of musk dropped into my being, sending its odor into all my
after-life--it may be that centuries hence it will not have lost its
fragrance. Who knows?

But sorrows--they should, like bitter medicines, be washed down with
sweet; we should get the taste of them out of our mouth as soon