Character and Conduct Part 54

Cheerfulness

NOVEMBER 26

"'Tis a Dutch proverb that 'paint costs nothing,' such are its preserving qualities in damp climates. Well, suns.h.i.+ne costs less, yet is finer pigment. And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more of it remains."

EMERSON.

"Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds and glitters for a moment. Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity."

ADDISON.

"Always laugh when you can; it is a cheap medicine. Merriment is a philosophy not well understood. It is the sunny side of existence."

BYRON.

"Fortune will call at the smiling gate."

j.a.panese Proverb.

Humour

NOVEMBER 27

"The sense of humour is the oil of life's engine. Without it, the machinery creaks and groans. No lot is so hard, no aspect of things is so grim, but it relaxes before a hearty laugh."

G. S. MERRIAM.

"It was a novel with a purpose, and its purpose was to show that it is only by righteousness that men and nations prevail; also that there is much that is humorous in life as well as much that is holy, and that healing virtue lies in laughter as well as in prayers and tears."

_Isabel Carnaby_, ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER.

"I dare not tell you how high I rate humour, which is generally most fruitful in the highest and most solemn human spirits. Dante is full of it, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and almost all the greatest have been pregnant with this glorious power. You will find it even in the Gospel of Christ."

_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.

Humour

NOVEMBER 28

"Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober."

1 PETER i. 13.

"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine."

PROV. xvii. 22.

"Gravity ... I mean simply that grave and serious way of looking at life which, while it never repels the true light-heartedness of pure and trustful hearts, welcomes into a manifest sympathy the souls of men who are oppressed and burdened, anxious and full of questions which for the time at least have banished all laughter from their faces.... Gravity has a delicate power of discrimination. It attracts all that it can help, and it repels all that could harm it or be harmed by it. It admits the earnest and simple with a cordial welcome. It shuts out the impertinent and insincere inexorably.

"The gravity of which I speak is not inconsistent with the keenest perception of the ludicrous side of things. It is more than consistent with--it is even necessary to--humour. Humour involves the perception of the true proportions of life.... It has softened the bitterness of controversy a thousand times. You cannot encourage it too much. You cannot grow too familiar with the books of all ages which have in them the truest humour, for the truest humour is the bloom of the highest life. Read George Eliot and Thackeray, and, above all, Shakespeare. They will help you to keep from extravagances without fading into insipidity.

They will preserve your gravity while they save you from pompous solemnity."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Beauties of Nature

NOVEMBER 29

"There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us."

GEORGE ELIOT.

"That man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset, while revolutions vex the world."

Th.o.r.eAU.

"So then believe that every bird that sings, And every flower that stars the elastic sod, And every thought the happy summer brings To the pure spirit is a word of G.o.d."

COLERIDGE.

Sense of the Beautiful

NOVEMBER 30

"No man receives the true culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and I know of no condition in life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is cheapest and the most to hand; and it seems to me to be the most important to those conditions where coa.r.s.e labour tends to give a grossness to the mind.

From the diffusion of the sense of beauty in ancient Greece, and of the taste for music in modern Germany, we learn that the people at large may partake of refined gratifications which have hitherto been thought to be necessarily restricted to a few."

CHANNING.

"Music--there is something very wonderful in music. Words are wonderful enough, but music is more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do, it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts n.o.ble feelings into us; it melts us to tears, we know not how; it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed. Music has been called the speech of angels; I will go farther, and call it the speech of G.o.d Himself.

"The old Greeks, the wisest of all the heathen, made a point of teaching their children music, because, they said, it taught them not to be self-willed and fanciful, but to see the beauty of order, the usefulness of rule, the divineness of law."

_Good News of G.o.d Sermons_, CHARLES KINGSLEY.

The Gospel of Beauty