If we look at a disappointment as a lesson, we soon take the sting out of it.  A spider will teach us that.  He is watching for a fly, and away the nimble fellow flies.  The spider upon this runs round his net to see whether there be any holes, and to mend them.  When doing so, he comes upon an old body of one of his victims, and he commences again on it, with a pious ejaculation of “Better luck next time.”  So one of the greatest and wisest missionaries whom we have ever had, tried, when a boy, to climb a tree.  He fell down, and broke his leg.  Seriously lamed, he went on crutches for six months, and at the end of that time quietly set about climbing the tree again, and succeeded.  He had, in truth, a reserve fund of good-humor and sound sense, saw where he failed, and conquered it.  His disappointment was worth twenty dozen successes to him, and to the world too.  It is a good rule, also, never to make too sure of any thing, and never to put too high a price on it.  Every thing is worth doing well; every thing, presuming you like it, is worth having.  The girl you fall in love with may be silly and ill-favored; but what of that? she is your love. “’Tis a poor fancy of mine own to like that which none other man will have,” says the fool Touchstone; but he speaks like a wise man.  He is wiser than the melancholy Jacques in the same play, who calls all people fools, and mopes about preaching wise saws.  If our young men were as wise, there would not be half the ill-assorted marriages in the world, and there would be fewer single women.  If they only chose by sense or fancy, or because they saw some good quality in a girl—­if they were not all captivated by the face alone, every Jill would have her Jack, and pair off happily, like the lovers in a comedy.  But it is not so.  We can not live without illusions; we can not, therefore, subsist without disappointments.  They, too, follow each other as the night the day, the shade the sunshine; they are as inseparable as life and death.

The difference of our conditions alone places a variety in these illusions; perhaps the lowest of us have the brightest, just as Cinderella, sitting amongst the coals, dreamed of the ball and beautiful prince as well as her sisters.  “Bare and grim to tears,” says Emerson, “is the lot of the children I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and would talk of ’the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown.’  Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country.  Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion.”  Happy is it that they are so.  These fancies and illusions bring forth the inevitable disappointments, but they carry life on with a swing.  If every hovel-born child had sat down at his doorstep, and taken true stock of himself, and had said, “I am a poor miserable child, weak in health, without knowledge, with little help, and can not do much,” we should have wanted