ded thoroughfares--sounds in our ears, jarring or
harmonious--the voices of friends, calling, warning, encouraging--of
preachers preaching--of people in the street below, complaining, and
asking our pity! What long processions of human beings are passing
before us! What trains of thought go sweeping through our brains! Man
seems a strange and ill-kept record of many and bewildering experiences.
Looking at oneself--not as oneself, but as an abstract human being--one
is lost in wonder at the vast complexities which have been brought to
bear upon it; lost in wonder, and in disappointment perhaps, at the
discordant result of so great a harmony. Only we know that the whole
diapason is beyond our grasp: one man cannot hear the note of the
grasshoppers, another is deaf when the cannon sounds. Waiting among
these many echoes and mysteries of every kind, and light and darkness,
and life and death, we seize a note or two of the great symphony, and
try to sing; and because these notes happen to jar, we think all is
discordant hopelessness. Then come pressing onward in the crowd of
life, voices with some of the notes that are wanting to our own
part--voices tuned to the same key as our own, or to an accordant one;
making harmony for us as they pass us by. Perhaps this is in life the
happiest of all experience, and to few of us there exists any more
complete ideal.

And so now and then in our lives, when we learn to love a sweet and
noble character, we all feel happier and better for the goodness and
charity which is not ours, and yet which seems to belong to us while
we are near it. Just as some people and states of mind affect us
uncomfortably, so we seem to be true to ourselves with a truthful
person, generous-minded with a generous nature; life seems less
disappointing and self-seeking when we think of the just and sweet and
unselfish spirits, moving untroubled among dinning and distracting
influences. These are our friends in the best and noblest sense. We are
the happier for their existence,--it is so much gain to us. They may
have lived at some distant time, we may never have met face to face, or
we may have known them and been blessed by their love; but their light
shines from afar, their life is for us and with us in its generous
example; their song is for our ears, and we hear it and love it still,
though the singer may be lying dead.

III.

A little book, written by one of Jane Austen's nephews, tells with a
touchin