ench proverb, "it
is vain for him to seek it elsewhere." Happy is he who has no sense of
discord with the harmony of the universe, who is open to the voices of
nature and of the spiritual realm, and who sees the light that never was
on sea or land. Such a life can but give expression to its inward
harmony. Every pure and healthy thought, every noble aspiration for the
good and the true, every longing of the heart for a higher and better
life, every lofty purpose and unselfish endeavor, makes the human spirit
stronger, more harmonious, and more beautiful. It is this alone that
gives a self-centered confidence in one's heaven-aided powers, and a
high-minded cheerfulness, like that of a celestial spirit. It is this
which an old writer has called the paradise of a good conscience.

"I count this thing to be grandly true,
That a noble deed is a step toward God;
Lifting the soul from the common clod
To a purer air and a broader view.

"We rise by the things that are under our feet;
By what we have mastered of good or gain;
By the pride deposed and the passion slain,
And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet."

"My body must walk the earth," said an ancient poet, "but I can put
wings on my soul, and plumes to my hardest thought." The splendors and
symphonies and the ecstacies of a higher world are with us now in the
rudimentary organs of eye and ear and heart. Much we have to do, much
we have to love, much we have to hope for; and our "joy is the grace we
say to God." "When I think upon God," said Haydn to Carpani, "my heart
is so full of joy that the notes leap from my pen."

Says Gibbons:--

"Our lives are songs:
God writes the words,
And we set them to music at leisure;
And the song is sad, or the song is glad,
As we choose to fashion the measure.

"We must write the song
Whatever the words,
Whatever its rhyme or meter;
And if it is sad, we must make it glad,
And if sweet, we must make it sweeter."

VI. "LOOKING PLEASANT"--SOMETHING TO BE WORKED FROM THE INSIDE.

Acting on a sudden impulse, an elderly woman, the widow of a soldier who
had been killed in the Civil War, went into a photographer's to have her
picture taken. She was seated before the camera wearing the same stern,
hard, forbidding look that had made her an object of fear to the
children living in the neighborhood, when the photographer, thrust