The first use of the smile is to express affectionate good-will; the second, to express mirth.

Why do we not always smile whenever we meet the eye of a fellow-being?  That is the true, intended recognition which ought to pass from soul to soul constantly.  Little children, in simple communities, do this involuntarily, unconsciously.  The honest-hearted German peasant does it.  It is like magical sunlight all through that simple land, the perpetual greeting on the right hand and on the left, between strangers, as they pass by each other, never without a smile.  This, then, is “the fine art of smiling;” like all fine art, true art, perfection of art, the simplest following of Nature.

Now and then one sees a face which has kept its smile pure and undefiled.  It is a woman’s face usually; often a face which has trace of great sorrow all over it, till the smile breaks.  Such a smile transfigures; such a smile, if the artful but knew it, is the greatest weapon a face can have.  Sickness and age cannot turn its edge; hostility and distrust cannot withstand its spell; little children know it, and smile back; even dumb animals come closer, and look up for another.

If one were asked to sum up in one single rule what would most conduce to beauty in the human face, one might say therefore, “Never tamper with your smile; never once use it for a purpose.  Let it be on your face like the reflection of the sunlight on a lake.  Affectionate good-will to all men must be the sunlight, and your face is the lake.  But, unlike the sunlight, your good-will must be perpetual, and your face must never be overcast.”

“What! smile perpetually?” says the realist.  “How silly!”

Yes, smile perpetually!  Go to Delsarte here, and learn even from the mechanician of smiles that a smile can be indicated by a movement of muscles so slight that neither instruments nor terms exist to measure or state it; in fact, that the subtlest smile is little more than an added brightness to the eye and a tremulousness of the mouth.  One second of time is more than long enough for it; but eternity does not outlast it.

In that wonderfully wise and tender and poetic book, the “Layman’s Breviary,” Leopold Schefer says,—­

  “A smile suffices to smile death away;
  And love defends thee e’en from wrath divine! 
  Then let what may befall thee,—­still smile on! 
  And howe’er Death may rob thee,—­still smile on! 
  Love never has to meet a bitter thing;
  A paradise blooms around him who smiles.”

Death-Bed Repentance.

Not long since, a Congregationalist clergyman, who had been for forty-one years in the ministry, said in my hearing, “I have never, in all my experience as a pastor, known of a single instance in which a repentance on what was supposed to be a death-bed proved to be of any value whatever after the person recovered.”

This was strong language.  I involuntarily exclaimed, “Have you known many such cases?”