oducing summer is so rich in
bounty as the mind is rich in thought when working its regnant and
creative moods. Vast are the buildings man's hands have reared; sweet
are the songs man's mind hath sung; lovely the faces man's hand hath
painted; but the silent songs the soul hears, the invisible pictures
the mind sees, the secret buildings the imagination rears, these are
a thousand-fold more beautiful than any as yet embodied in this
material world.

The Spanish have a proverb that "He who sows thoughts will reap acts,
habits, and character," for destiny itself is determined by thinking.
Life is won or lost by its master thoughts. As nothing reveals
character like the company we like and keep, so nothing foretells
futurity like the thoughts over which we brood. It was said of John
Keats that his face was the face of one who had seen a vision. So long
had his inner eye been fixed upon beauty, so long had he loved that
vision splendid, so long had he lived with it, that not only did his
soul take on the loveliness of what he contemplated, but the very
lines of the poet's face were chiseled into beauty by those sculptors
called thoughts and ideals. When Wordsworth speaks of the girl's
beauty as "born of murmuring sound," the poet indicates his belief
that the girl's long love of the sweet briar and the thrush's song,
her tender care of her favorite flowers, had ended in the saturation
of her own face with sweetness. Swiftly do we become like the thoughts
we love. Scholars have noticed that old persons who have "lived long
together, 'midst sunshine and 'midst cloudy weather," come at length
to look as nearly alike as do brother and sister: Emerson explains
this likeness by saying that long thinking the same thoughts and
loving the same objects mould similarity into the features. Nor is
there any beauty in the face of youth or maiden that can long survive
sourness in the disposition or discontent in the heart.

Contrariwise, all have seen faces very plain naturally that have
become positively radiant because the beautiful soul that is enmeshed
in and stands behind the muscles has shone through and beautified all
of the facial tissues. Two of our great novelists have made a special
study of the architectural power of thoughts. Dickens exhibits Monks
as beginning his career as an innocent and beautiful child; but as
ending his life as a mass of solid bestiality, a mere chunk of fleshed
iniquity. It was thinking upon vice and