coddling which deprives a child of all delicate and strong emotions lest it be saddened, or excited, or alarmed, leaves it dangerously soft of fibre.  Coleridge, an unhappy little lad at school, was lifted out of his own troubles by an acquaintance with the heroic sorrows of the world.  There is no page of history, however dark, there is no beautiful old tale, however tragic, which does not impart some strength and some distinction to the awakening mind.  It is possible to overrate the superlative merits of insipidity as a mental and moral force in the development of youth.

There are people who surrender themselves without reserve to needless activities, who have a real affection for telephones, and district messengers, and the importunities of their daily mail.  If they are women, they put special delivery stamps on letters which would lose nothing by a month’s delay.  If they are men, they exult in the thought that they can be reached by wireless telegraphy on mid-ocean.  We are apt to think of these men and women as painful products of our own time and of our own land; but they have probably existed since the building of the Tower of Babel,—­a nerve-racking piece of work which gave peculiar scope to strenuous and impotent energies.

A woman whose every action is hurried, whose every hour is open to disturbance, whose every breath is drawn with superfluous emphasis, will talk about the nervous strain under which she is living, as though dining out and paying the cook’s wages were the things which are breaking her down.  The remedy proposed for such “strain” is withdrawal from the healthy buffetings of life,—­not for three days, as Burke withdrew in order that he might read “Evelina,” and be rested and refreshed thereby; but long enough to permit of the notion that immunity from buffetings is a possible condition of existence,—­of all errors, the most irretrievable.

It has been many centuries since Marcus Aurelius observed the fretful disquiet of Rome, which must have been strikingly like our fretful disquiet to-day, and proffered counsel, unheeded then as now:  “Take pleasure in one thing and rest in it, passing from one social act to another, thinking of God.”

The Girl Graduate

“When I find learning and wisdom united in one person, I do not wait to consider the sex; I bend in admiration.”—­LA BRUYERE.

We shall never know, though we shall always wonder, why certain phrases, carelessly flung to us by poet or by orator, should be endowed with regrettable vitality.  When Tennnyson wrote that mocking line about “sweet girl graduates in their golden hair,” he could hardly have surmised that it would be quoted exuberantly year after weary year, or that with each successive June it would reappear as the inspiration of flowery editorials, and of pictures, monotonously amorous, in our illustrated journals.  Perhaps in view of the serious statistics which have for some time past girdled the woman student, statistics dealing exhaustively with her honours, her illnesses, her somewhat nebulous achievements, and the size of her infant families, it is as well to realize that the big, unlettered, easy-going world regards her still from the standpoint of golden hair, and of the undying charm of immaturity.