upon Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle.  For an hour the philosopher poured forth vehement tirade against the commercial spirit, while the good wife never once opened her lips.  At last the author ceased talking, and there was silence for a time.  Suddenly Carlyle thundered:  “Jane, stop breathing so loud!” Long years before Jane had stopped doing everything else except breathe.  And so, obedient to the injunction, a few days afterward she ceased “breathing so loud.”

When a few weeks had gone by Carlyle discovered, through reading her journal, that his wife had for want of affection frozen and starved to death within his home like some poor traveler who had fallen in the snows beyond the door.  For years, without his realizing it, she had kept all the wheels oiled, kept his body in health and his mind in happiness.  Only when it was too late did the husband realize that his fame was largely his wife’s.  Then did the old man begin his pathetic pilgrimage to his wife’s grave, where Froude often found him murmuring:  “If I had only known!  If I had only known!” For all his supreme gifts and rare talents were marred by harshness.  Intellectual brilliancy weighs light as punk against the gold of gentleness and character.  Half Carlyle’s books, weighted by a gentle, noble spirit, would have availed more for social progress than these many volumes with the bad taste they leave in the mouth.  The sign of ripeness in an apple, a peach, is beauty, and the test of character is gentleness and kindness of heart.

One of the crying needs of society is a revival of gentleness and of a refined considerateness in judging others.  There is no disposition that cuts at the very root of character like harshness, and there is nothing that blights happiness and breeds discord like unlovingness and severity of judgment.  We hear much of industrial strife, social warfare and want of sympathy between the classes.  Be it remembered, gentleness alone can be invoked to heal the breach.  There is a legend that when Jacob with his family and flocks met Esau with his children and herds, the angels of God hovered in the air above the two brothers and began to rain gifts down upon their companies.  Strangely enough, each forgetting the gifts falling in his own camp, rushed forth to pick up the gifts falling in that of his brother.  There was anger stirred.  Epithets and stones began to fly, until all the air was filled with flying weapons.  In such a scrimmage the messengers of peace had no place.  Soon the sound of receding wings died out of the air, the gifts ceased to fall and all things faded into the light of common day.  This legend interprets to us how harshness breeds strife and robs man of his gifts from God and his happiness through his brother man.