diant and calm is able to bring enfeeblement unto the
life of our soul. Enfeeblement comes through our dwelling, by night and
by day, in the airless room of our cold, self-satisfied, trivial,
ungenerous thoughts, at a time when the sky all around our abode is
reflecting the light of the ocean.

But there is a difference perhaps between the sage and the thinker. It
may be that sorrow will steal over the thinker as he stands on the
height he has gained; but the sage by his side only smiles--and this
smile is so loyal, so human and natural, that the humblest creature of
all must needs understand, and will gladly welcome it to him, as it
falls like a flower to the foot of the mountain. The thinker throws
open the road "which leads from the seen to the unseen;" the sage
throws open the highway that takes us from that which we love to-day to
that which we yet shall love, and the paths that ascend from that which
has ceased to console to that which, for long time to come, shall be
laden with deep consolation. It is needful, but not all-sufficient, to
have reflected deeply and boldly on man, and nature, and God; for the
profoundest thought is of little avail if it contain no germ of
comfort. Indeed, it is only thought that the thinker, as yet, does nor
wholly possess; as the other thoughts are, too, that remain outside our
normal, everyday life. It is easier far to be sad and dwell in
affliction than at once to do what time in the end will always compel
us to do: to shake ourselves free from affliction. He who spends his
days gloomily, in constant mistrust of his fellows, will often appear a
profounder thinker than the other, who lives in the faith and honest
simplicity wherein all men should dwell. Is there a man can believe he
has done all it lay in his power to do if, as he meditates thus, in the
name of his brethren, on the sorrows of life, he hides from
them--anxious, perhaps, not to weaken his grandiose picture of
sorrow--the reasons wherefore he accepts life, reasons that must be
decisive, since he himself continues to live? The thought must be
incomplete surely whose object is not to console. It is easier for you
to tell me the cause of your sorrow than, very simply, to speak of the
deeper, the weightier reasons that induce your instinct to cling to
this life whose distress you bemoan. Which of us finds not, unsought,
many thousands of reasons for sorrow? It is doubtless of service that
the sage should point out those t