be considered absolute monomaniacs, who should insist on
having their pianos tuned to accord with any abstract notion of
propriety or perfection,--rendering themselves wretched by persistently
singing all their pieces miserably out of tune in consequence.

Yet there are persons who keep the requirements of life strained up
always at concert pitch, and are thus worn out and made miserable all
their days by the grating of a perpetual discord.

There is a faculty of the human mind to which phrenologists have given
the name of _Ideality_, which is at the foundation of this exactingness.
Ideality is the faculty by which we conceive of and long for perfection;
and at a glance it will be seen, that, so far from being an evil
ingredient of human nature, it is the one element of progress that
distinguishes man's nature from that of the brute. While animals go on
from generation to generation, learning nothing and forgetting nothing,
practising their small circle of the arts of life no better and no worse
from year to year, man is driven by ideality to constant invention and
alteration, whence come arts, sciences, and the whole progress of
society. Ideality induces discontent with present attainments,
possessions, and performances, and hence come better and better ones.
So in morals, ideality constantly incites to higher and nobler modes of
living and thinking, and is the faculty to which the most effective
teachings of the great Master of Christianity are addressed. To be
dissatisfied with present attainments, with earthly things and scenes,
to aspire and press on to something forever fair, yet forever receding
before our steps,--this is the teaching of Christianity, and the work of
the Christian.

But every faculty has its own instinctive, wild growth, which, like the
spontaneous produce of the earth, is crude and weedy.

Revenge, says Lord Bacon, is a sort of wild justice, obstinacy is
untutored firmness,--and so exactingness is untrained ideality; and a
vast deal of misery, social and domestic, comes, not of the faculty, but
of its untrained exercise.

The faculty which is ever conceiving and desiring something better and
more perfect must be modified in its action by good sense, patience, and
conscience, or it induces a morbid, discontented spirit, which courses
through the veins of individual and family life like a subtle poison.

In a certain neighborhood are two families whose social and domestic
_animus_ illustrate