172 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MARRIAGE. wants, shirts that want washing, hose that want mending, whims that want attending to, ailments that want poulticing, appetites that want cooking for, perverseness that wants bearing with, passions that want patience, and cowardly spirits that want comforting." Mountford. Siebenkäs could never inspire Lenette with a lyrical enthusiasm of love, in which she could forget heaven and earth and every thing else. She could count the strokes of the town clock between his kisses, and could listen and run off to the saucepan that was boiling over, with all the big tears in her eyes which he had pressed out of her melting heart by a touching story or a sermon. She accompanied in her devotion the Sunday hymns which echoed loudly from the neighboring apartments, and in the midst of a verse she would interweave the prosaic question, "What shall I warm up for supper? and he could never banish from his remembrance that once, when she was quite touched, and listening to his cabinet discourse upon death and eternity, she looked at him thoughtfully, but towards his feet, and at length said, "Don't put on the left stocking to-morrow, I must darn it." The author of this history declares that he has sometimes almost lost his wits at such feminine interludes. Richter. PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING. THINGS ARE THE SNAKE. Why LET us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early, and fast, or breakfast, gently and without perturbation; let company come, and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, determined to make a day of it. should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger, and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. Thoreau. Mr. Emerson says, "things are the snake." Not only our weaknesses, our very virtues may lead us into slavery to things. Things creep in and take possession under cover of an idea or a virtue. Gradually things take precedence of persons, and persons are treated like things. Things, persons, ideas; he whose life shares itself uncon sciously and justly between these three, is indeed favored of nature. Most of us have a preference, and are too contented or too discontented, according as this is gratified. Persons may be sacrificed either to things or to ideal virtues. It is not easy to appreciate great and remote virtues, and at the same time to love enough those with whom our lot is cast, when they are neither noble nor attractive, not easy to feel always that it is more to be a living soul, a child of God, than to have a little more even of his best gifts. Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds, and storms, and quicksands, and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom, and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary, eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. Our nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just FINERY NOT BEAUTY. 175 such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps; ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them, is a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life, and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Thoreau. Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. For no man can bear to be entirely deprived of such enjoyments; it is only because they are not used to taste of what is excellent, that the generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they be new. For this reason one ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. Goethe. I am no advocate for meanness of private habitation. I would fain introduce into it all magnificence, care, and beauty where they are possible; but I would not have that useless expense in unnoticed fineries or formalities; cornicings of ceilings and graining of doors, and fringing of curtains, and thousands such things which have become foolishly and apathetically habitual-things on whose common appliance hang whole trades, to which there 176 - MEANS BECOME ENDS. never yet belonged the blessing of giving one ray of real pleasure, or becoming of the remotest or most contemptible use, things which cause half the expense of life, and destroy more than half its comfort, manliness, respectability, freshness, and facility. I speak from experience; I know what it is to live in a cottage with a deal floor and roof, and a hearth of mica slate; and I know it to be in many respects healthier and happier, than living between a Turkey carpet and gilded ceiling, beside a steel grate and polished fender. I do not say that such things have not their place and propriety; but I say this emphatically, that the tenth part of the expense which is sacrificed in domestic vanities, if not absolutely and meaninglessly lost in domestic discomforts and incumbrances, would, if collectively offered and wisely employed, build a marble church for every town in England; such a church as it should be a joy and a blessing even to pass near in our daily ways and walks, and as it would bring the light into the eyes to see from afar, lifting its fair height above the purple crowd of humble roofs. Ruskin. The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. kind. But what an operose method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses |