HUMAN GREATNESS

is at best such a little thing that wise men do not lament its absence in their own persons.  Our main pleasures are free to rich as well as poor.  What sight is so grand as the sun?  What pleasure is greater than to breathe?  What fluid is more grateful for all purposes than water?  What music is sweeter than the singing of birds, the ringing of free school bells and the hum of machinery?  The extra pleasures which the rich man, if he be foolish, tries to buy, almost invariably

END IN HIS EARLY DEATH,

and in his hatred of the whole world.  Those noble men of wealth who gain the plaudits of their fellows, have earned those plaudits just as poor men would earn them—­by service to their fellow-creatures.  Man is not constituted so that he can “take his ease” and be happy.  The prisoner in solitary confinement is forced to take his ease, and we are told that he suffers terribly under the ordeal.  Of course you have heard of

THE PRISONER IN THE DARK DUNGEON

who had three pins, and who gave himself employment by throwing them into the air and then beginning the long search which should finally secure them.  Sometimes a pin would be hidden for years in a crevice.  In this way the prisoner preserved his mind from utter decay, and was almost happy—­nay, was really happy when his arduous labor would result in the discovery of all three of the objects of his pitiful quest.  Instances like this should impress upon us the fact that the principal sum of our happiness is inalienable.  We cannot, in health, possibly lose it.  The hale pauper is far better off than the invalid Duke.  We breathe and eat and see and hear with ease.  All of those offices of the body are unquestionably delightful, as is proven by the relative view we get when we are ill and can neither breathe nor eat nor see nor hear without great suffering.  “There is scarce any lot so low,” says Sterne, “but there is something in it to satisfy the man whom it has befallen.”  The reason of this lies in this same fact that when the tree of happiness loses superfluous wealth, it but loses its foliage.

THE POOR MAN CARRIES INTO HIS COTTAGE

all the great and marvelous blessings of life.  He leaves outside only a lot of artificialities, the most of which are so-called pleasures, but are really miseries.  If we cannot be contented without these artificialities, we certainly would not be satisfied with an addition so unimportant.  “A tub was large enough for Diogenes,” says Colton; “but a world was too little for Alexander.”  Alexander valued the true blessings of life as nothing, and the power of life and death over others as everything.  His disappointment and the contentment of Diogenes, who viewed things more correctly, are matters of tradition.  “Contentment,” says Fuller, “consisteth not in adding more fuel, but