THE GREEDINESS OF HUMAN WANTS.

You are little to be pitied in justice—­greatly, in mercy!  Lie there and pity humanity, for they would be all like you, did not they follow in nature’s paths, where the roses of the wayside hide more of their ugliness.  All I would impose is that you walk where you will look least hideous, even in your own eyes.

As, in Paradise, when Milton was all ablaze with poetic glory, he waved his more than kingly sceptre and thus ushered in the night—­

Now came still evening on—­
Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires:  Hesperus that led
The starry host rode brightest—­

—­So does woman, soft as still Evening, shining as all the starry hosts with goodness and with mercy, come into the night of disease, and soften its harsh desert with the dews of her kindness.  Sickness teaches us how good and true is woman, how useful in the world, how necessary to our welfare and proper destiny.  If any man have learned this on a sick bed

HE HAS NOT BEEN SICK FOR NAUGHT.

He is a man of progressive ideas and unfolding nature.  Sir Walter Scott has put into words a thought that has ever had man’s approbation: 

     O woman! in our hours of ease,
     Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
     And variable as the shade
     By the light, quivering aspen made;
     When pain and anguish wring the brow,
     A ministering angel thou!

“It is in sickness,” says Hosea Ballou, “that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent one upon another for our comfort and even necessities.  This desire, opening our eyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing.”  “Sickness,” says Burton, “puts us in mind of our mortality, and while we drive on heedlessly in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear, and brings us to a sense of our duty.”  “It is then,” says Pliny, “that man recollects there is a God, and that he himself is but a man.  No mortal is then the object of his envy, his admiration, or his contempt.”  “In sickness,” says Shakspeare, playing with his prepositions, “let me not so much say, ‘Am I getting better of my pain?’ as ’Am I getting better for it?’”

LET US THEREFORE GIVE UP THE IDEA

of those great reformations which we formulate upon our mattresses of misery, and rather confine ourselves to a few betterments of our lives which are possible.  If we are spendthrifts, we should vow to spend our money for goods of more solid worth than a taste of this thing, a whiff of that, or a sight of the other.  If we are proud, let us resolve to speak kindly at least to those who have been lately ill.  If we are stingy, let us make ready to give, notwithstanding, to those who need as badly as we have needed.  If we are doubtful of the goodness of the gentle sex, let us at any rate thereafter except forever their qualities as a faithful succor of