Let us, if anything like a general reform be possible in these times of dispersion and of scattering, keep henceforth our sense of humour in a place better guarded, as something worth a measure of seclusion.  It should not loiter in wait for the alms of a joke in adventurous places.  For the sense of humour has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.  It has negative tasks of valid virtue; for example, the standing and waiting within call of tragedy itself, where, excluded, it may keep guard.

No reasonable man will aver that the Oriental manners are best.  This would be to deny Shakespeare as his comrades knew him, where the wit “out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine,” and to deny Ben Jonson’s “tart Aristophanes, neat Terence, witty Plautus,” and the rest.  Doubtless Greece determined the custom for all our Occident; but none the less might the modern world grow more sensible of the value of composure.

To none other of the several powers of our souls do we so give rein as to this of humour, and none other do we indulge with so little fastidiousness.  It is as though there were honour in governing the other senses, and honour in refusing to govern this.  It is as though we were ashamed of reason here, and shy of dignity, and suspicious of temperance, and diffident of moderation, and too eager to thrust forward that which loses nothing by seclusion.

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.  Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts.  Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known.  Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure.  What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.  Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.  Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards recovery.  Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will be intolerable to-morrow; to-day it is easy to bear, but the cause has not passed.  Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain—­it returns.  Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise.  If we had made a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would have had an expectation instead of a discovery.  No one makes such observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles.  But Thomas a Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them.  In his cell alone with the elements—­“What wouldst thou more than these? for out of these were all things made”—­he