Not a few are willing to shelter their folly behind the respectability of downright vice. We are frequently understood the least by those who have known us the longest. The reasons which any man offers to you for his own conduct betray his opinion of your character. If you are very often deceived by those around you, you may be sure that you deserve to be deceived; and that instead of railing at the general falseness of mankind, you have first to pronounce judgment on your own jealous tyranny, or on your own weak credulity. Those only who can bear the truth will hear it. The wisest maxims are not those which fortify us against the deceit of others. Very subtle-minded persons often complain that their friends fall from them; and these complaints are not altogether unjust. One reason of this is that they display so much dialectic astuteness on every occasion, that their friends feel certain that such men, however unjustifiably they may behave, will always be able to justify themselves to themselves. Now we mortals are strangely averse to loving those who are never in the wrong, and much more those who are always ready to prove themselves in the right. You cannot insure the gratitude of others for a favor conferred upon them in the way which is most agreeable to yourself. How singularly mournful it is to observe in the conversation or writings of a very superior man and original thinker, homely, if not commonplace, expressions about the vanity of human wishes, the mutability of this world, the weariness of life. It seems as if he felt that his own bitter experience had taken away the triteness from that which is nevertheless so trite; as if he thought it were needless to seek fine phrases, and as idle a mockery as it would be to gild an instrument of torture. It must be a very weary day to the youth, when he first discovers that after all he will only become a man. It is unwise for a great man to reason as if others were like : him it is much more unwise to treat them as if they were very different. Men are ruined by the exceptions to their general rules of action. This may seem a mockery, but it is nevertheless a fact to be observed in the records of history, as well as in the trivial occurrences of daily life. One who is habitually dark and deceptive commits a single act of confidence, and his subtle schemes are destroyed forever. His first act of extravagance ruins the cautious man. The coward is brave for a moment, and dies; the hero wavers for the first- and the last time. Some persons are insensible to flattering words; but who can resist the flattery of modest imitation? An inferior demon is not a great man, as some writers would fain persuade us. The world would be in a more wretched state than it is at present, if riches and honors were distributed according to merit alone. It is the complaint of the wisest of men, that he "returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." But if it were otherwise, if bread were indeed the portion of the wise, then the hungry would have something to lament over more severe even than the pangs of hunger. The belief that merit is generally neglected forms the secret consolation of almost every human being, from the mightiest prince to the meanest peasant. Divines have contended that the world would cease to be a place of trial if a system of impartial distribution according to merit were adopted. This is true, for it would then be a place of punishment. There is no power in the wisdom of the insincere. Conviction never abides without a welcome from the heart. It is necessary to be decisive; not because deliberate counsel would never improve your designs, but because the foolish and the unthinking will certainly act if there be but a moment's pause. The practical man—an especial favorite in this age — often takes the field with his single fact against a great principle, in the reckless spirit of one who would not hesitate to sever the thread on which he is unable to string his own individual pearl -perhaps a false one-even though he should scatter many jewels worthy of a prince's diadem. Even the meanest are mighty to do evil. If there is any one quality of the mind in which the really great have conspired, as it were, to surpass other men, it is moral courage. He who possesses this quality may sometimes be made a useful tool or a ready sacrifice in the hands of crafty statesmen; but let him be the chief, and not the subordinate, give him the field, grant him the opportunity, and his name will not deserve to be unwritten in the records of his country. When such a man perceives that if he fail, every one will be able to understand the risk that has been incurred; but that if he succeed, no one will estimate the danger that has silently been overcome; he bows, nevertheless, to the supreme dictates of his own judgment, regardless alike of the honors of his own age, and the praises of posterity. It requires some moral courage to disobey, and yet there have been occasions when obedience would have been defeat. But it is not only in the council, in the senate, in the field, that its merits are so preeminent. In private life, what daily deceit would be avoided, what evils would be remedied, if men did but possess more moral courage! - not that false image of it which proceeds from a blind and inconsiderate rashness, from an absence both of forethought and imagination; but that calm reliance on the decisions of reason, that carelessness of the undeserved applause of our neighbor, which will induce the great man to act according to his own inforined judgment, and not according to the opinions of those who will not know, and who could never appreciate his motives. Feeble applause may arise from a keen and fastidious sense of the slightest imperfection; but it is more frequently to be attributed to an inadequate notion of the dangers which have been avoided, and the difficulties which have been overcome. The trifling of a great man is never trivial. POEMS OF ALFRED DE MUSSET. [LOUIS CHARLES ALFRED DE MUSSET, French poet and dramatist, was born in Paris, November 11, 1810. Hesitating in the choice of a profession, he successively tried and abandoned law, medicine, and painting, and ultimately, under the influence of the so-called romantic movement, applied himself to literature, making his début as an author with "Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie" (1830). In 1833 he went to Italy with George Sand; but, after an extended trip, fell out with her at Venice, and returned to France alone. He was librarian to the Department of the Interior under Louis Philippe, and in 1852 was received at the French Academy. Irregular and dissolute living undermined his health, and he died at Paris, May 1, 1857. Among his noteworthy works are: the poem "Namouna"; "The Confession of a Child of the Century "; and the plays "Fantasio," "Barberine," "Lorenzaccio," "On ne badine pas avec l'Amour" ("One does not play with Love"), etc.] FROM THE "ODE TO MALIBRAN." (Translated by Fanny Kemble Butler.) O MARIA FELICIA! the painter and bard And their great, eager souls, other action debarred, Though struck down in the strife, claim its trophies as theirs In the iron engraved, one his name leaves enshrined; With a golden-sweet cadence another's entwined Makes forever all those who shall hear it his friends. Though he died, on the canvas lives Raphael's mind; And from death's darkest doom, till this world of ours ends As the lamp guards the flame, so the bare marble halls The memory of Phidias enshrined in their walls. From the altar, where smiling she still holds her place, Thus, from age after age while new light we receive, And the accents of genius their echoes still weave With the great human voice, till their thoughts are but one. And of thee, dead but yesterday, all thy fame leaves. But a cross in the dim chapel's darkness - alone. |