or Shakspeare.  How curious it is that we always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call blessed!  There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all joyousness from their countenances.  I meet one such in the street not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look of recognition,—­something as if he were one of Heaven’s assessors, come down to “doom” every acquaintance he met,—­that I have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a violent cold, dating from that instant.  I don’t doubt he would cut his kitten’s tail off, if he caught her playing with it.  Please tell me, who taught her to play with it?

No, no!—­give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies.  I know nothing in English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne “Every man truly lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself.”

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving:  To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—­but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.  There is one very sad thing in old friendships, to every mind that is really moving onward.  It is this:  that one cannot help using his early friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress.  Every now and then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a string of thought tied to him, and look—­I am afraid with a kind of luxurious and sanctimonious compassion—­to see the rate at which the string reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and down, poor fellow! and we are dashing along with the white foam and bright sparkle at our bows;—­the ruffled bosom of prosperity and progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck in it!  But this is only the sentimental side of the matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow all that we love.

Don’t misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you.  It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary, we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy.  We see just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the balance