too close-mouthed?  Honor you must ask of him, for you must feel free to speak.  Charity you should expect from him, for the heart is open to him as it is to no other, and knowledge, large knowledge, is the food which nourishes charity in the tender-hearted.  In the tender-hearted?  How can he be that?  All his days he has walked amidst misery, anguish, bodily and mental suffering.  Be careful when you come to test him by his ability to feel what you call sympathy.  In its loftiest meaning this is the capacity to enter into, to realize, and hence to feel with and for you.  There is a mystery about this matter.  I know men who have never suffered gravely in mind or body, who yet have some dramatic power to enter into the griefs of others, and to comprehend, as if by intuition, just what others feel, and hence how best to say and do the things which heal or help.  I know others, seemingly as tender, who, with sad experience to aid them, appear to lack the imaginative insight needed to make their education in sorrow of use to their fellows.  There are times when all that men can give of sympathetic tenderness is of use.  There are others when what you crave is but the outcome of morbid desires for some form of interested attention.  You may ask too much, and every doctor knows how curiously this persistent claim for what you call sympathy does, as the nurses say, “take it out of a doctor.”  The selfishness of nervous women sometimes exceeds belief in its capacity to claim pity and constancy of expressed sympathy.

In times of more serious peril and suffering, be assured that the best sympathy is that which calmly translates itself into the desire to be of practical use, and that the extreme of capacity to feel your woes would be in a measure enfeebling to energetic utility.  This it is which makes a man unfit to attend those who are dear to him, or, to emphasize the illustration, to medically treat himself.  He goes to extremes, loses judgment, and does too much; fears to hurt, and does too little.  I once saw a very young physician burst into tears at sight of a burnt child, a charming little girl.  He was practically useless for the time.  And I have known men who had to abandon their profession on account of too great sensibility to suffering.

There is a measure of true sympathy which comes of kindness and insight, which has its value, and but one.  Does it help you over the hard places?  Does it aid you to see clearly and to bear patiently?  Does it truly nourish character, and tenderly but, firmly set you where you can gain a larger view of the uses of pain and distress?  That is the truest sympathy.  Does it leave you feebler with mere pity?  Does it accentuate pain and grief by simply dwelling on it with barren words?  I leave you to say what that is.  We have a certain gentle disrespect among us for the doctor who is described as, oh! so sympathetic,—­the man who goes about his work with a pocket-full of banal phrases calculated to soothe and comfort the cravings of the wretched.  The sick and feeble take gladly these imitation crumbs cast from the full table of the strong.  But sometimes people of firm character revolt at such petty and economical charity.  I heard a vigorous old Quaker lady say once, after a consultation, “Thee will do me a kindness not to ask me to see that man again.  Thee knows that I don’t like my feelings poulticed.”