carries with it involuntarily sweetness, calmness, courage, hope, and happiness.  Yet this is the portion of good nature in a large-minded, strong-natured man.  When it has made him happy, it has scarcely begun its office.  God sends a natural heart-singer—­a man whose nature is large and luminous, and who, by his very carriage and spontaneous actions, calms, cheers, and helps his fellows.  God bless him, for he blesses everybody!” This is just what Mr. Beecher would have said about Phillips Brooks.

And what better can be said than to compare the heart’s good cheer to a floral offering? Are not flowers appropriate gifts to persons of all ages, in any conceivable circumstances in which they are placed?  So the heart’s good cheer and deeds of kindness are always acceptable to children and youth, to busy men and women, to the aged, and to a world of invalids.

“Thus live and die, O man immortal,” says Dr. Chalmers.  “Live for something.  Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue, which the storms of time can never destroy.  Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy, on the hearts of those who come in contact with you, and you will never be forgotten.  Good deeds will shine as brightly on earth as the stars of heaven.”

What is needed to round out human happiness is a well-balanced life.  Not ease, not pleasure, not happiness, but a man, Nature is after.  “There is,” says Robert Waters, “no success without honor; no happiness without a clear conscience; no use in living at all if only for one’s self.  It is not at all necessary for you to make a fortune, but it is necessary, absolutely necessary, that you should become a fair-dealing, honorable, useful man, radiating goodness and cheerfulness wherever you go, and making your life a blessing.”

“When a man does not find repose in himself,” says a French proverb, “it is vain for him to seek it elsewhere.”  Happy is he who has no sense of discord with the harmony of the universe, who is open to the voices of nature and of the spiritual realm, and who sees the light that never was on sea or land.  Such a life can but give expression to its inward harmony.  Every pure and healthy thought, every noble aspiration for the good and the true, every longing of the heart for a higher and better life, every lofty purpose and unselfish endeavor, makes the human spirit stronger, more harmonious, and more beautiful.  It is this alone that gives a self-centered confidence in one’s heaven-aided powers, and a high-minded cheerfulness, like that of a celestial spirit.  It is this which an old writer has called the paradise of a good conscience.

    “I count this thing to be grandly true,
      That a noble deed is a step toward God;
      Lifting the soul from the common clod
    To a purer air and a broader view.

    “We rise by the things that are under our feet;
      By what we have mastered of good or gain;
      By the pride deposed and the passion slain,
    And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet.”