to come closest to us after all. There is a hint for the modern philosophers in the frankness of the woman who replied to the photographer's request that she assume a more pleasing expression, "I suppose I can do it if you insist, but I can tell you right now it won't look like me." Shadow and sunshine, smiles and tears, enter so ineradicably into the fabric of life that the person who wears the smile that won't come off has too much the character of the figure on a billboard for yearning, throbbing humanity to take him very tenderly to heart. There is truth, no doubt, in Dr. Johnson's assertion that the habit of looking on the bright side of things is worth a thousand pounds a year, but only he who recognizes that there is another side can do this to any saving purpose in the world of men. One must go to the deeps of sorrow to declare the sublimity of joy. Denying or ignoring the pains and wrongs and sorrows of our common humanity can never reach the heart of the trouble. The Christ himself, as a late writer says, instead of denying, "met them face to face, with perfect directness, perfect sympathy, perfect perceptions." "But he made allowance for weakness and despaired of none. He proved that nothing was unbearable, but that the human spirit can face the worst calamities with an indomitable simplicity which adorns it with an imperishable beauty and proves it to be indeed divine." This seems to be the true basis for that cheerful spirit which is so largely in demand. But it is not exactly the one that the professedly and professionally cheerful person lays down for us, and that is why some ungrateful souls, who do not recognize that at least his aims are good, call him altogether depressing. Another point in the philosophy which is too commonly ignored is the part which nature takes in fashioning man to his moods. "Some people are born to make life pretty and others to grumble that it is not pretty," says George Eliot, and though multitudinous counsels are brought to the help of the latter class, yet until the surgeons take hold of them it is not probable that the responsibility can be entirely fastened upon them nor the happy thought cure be made very effective. They seem to be as incorrigible as the man who insisted upon hanging to a street car strap though the conductor pointed him to a vacant seat, because he was elected to "show the street car indignities” and proposed to say truthfully that he "had ridden downtown six successive days hanging to a strap." There are always some people who set out in plain dress and repellant exterior to find the seamy side of life and congregations, and they invariably find it. But they are hardly the ones who appeal to us in the tender fashion of George Eliot's heroine, who whispers, "Pray make a point of liking me, in spite of my deficiencies," or can fathom the great poet's meaning when he said that next to the pleasure of love is its pain. A shallow pessimism and a shallow optimism alike miss the true meaning and grandeur of life. Likewise they miss that finer understanding upon which human ties and friendships are based, and that subtle and pensive spell which the very sense and mystery of mortality brings to the "bright glints of immortality" flashing forever through the fleshly bars. Even worldly prosperity, which lifts a friend too absorbingly into the sunlight lessens ofttimes the tender tie that other days have bound. It can be nothing else than this that gave us that dreary maxim of La Rochefoucauld which submits that "in the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not exactly displeasing." That they will come nearer to us in sorrow than in joy may be a selfish feeling, but it proclaims a human truth that philosophy can not afford to ignore. It is interwoven for some purpose in that grand virtue of sympathy wherein lies man's true greatness and chance of usefulness to his fellow-men. And herein consists the danger of any code of life that would separate itself from human conditions and needs, and deny both existence and sympathy to such conditions. For the author is right who says: "We can not solve the mystery of this difficult world; but we may be sure of this, that it is not for nothing that we are set in the midst of interests and relationships, of liking and loving, of tenderness and mirth, of sorrow and pain." If we are to get the most and best out of life we must not seclude ourselves from these things. One of the nearest and simplest of duties is sympathy with others, and sympathy in no limited sense, but sympathy that we can only gain through looking at humanity in its wholeness. ENCHANTMENT OF THE GREEN-ROBED FOREST R MONARCHS USKIN is right. It was a beautiful thing when God thought of a tree. Of all the pageant train of nature that puts on the bloom and splendor of Litanias courts to keep the summer festival, this monarch of the forest strikes deepest into the heart of earth, as it also climbs highest into the blue of heaven. The daisies and the buttercups nestle close to the ground; even the lilies and the roses come and go in transient fellowship with the sod and the grass on the hillside withers at the parched earth's breath or "the wind passes over it and it is gone." But "the green-robed senators of mighty woods, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, dream on and on" in the azure deeps of heaven, and by a myriad finger points of verdant green and airy lightness lift man farthest from the earth. No doubt it is this close communion with the skies, and all the whispering voices of the upper air, which has given to these high priests of nature the "anciently reported spells" which Druids and sibyls sages and seers, poets and mystics of all ages have ascribed to them. Nor can these fair humanities of old religions quite forsake their haunts in "piny mountain” or "forest by slow stream." Still, a presence is in the silent wood, a sense of life "more deep and true" than any mortal knows is in the trusting sway of the delicate branches to any softest breeze or rushing whirlwind of the skies that may sweep over them. And science tells us, could we but turn less sense-dulled ears to their whispering voices, the very music of the spheres would come down to us on their eolian harps of melody. Such secrets as the talking oaks of Dodona revealed to the ancient Greek, may verily belong to their high union with the heart of nature, could souls as kin to them as the nature-loving Greeks once more be found. Closest in all the symbolism of the outside world to the inner verities the history of the tree might almost stand for the history of man in all his mortal hopes and strivings. Not only in his early Eden did it play sentinel and second in his spirit gains and losses, but all along the path of history in his failing like the green bay tree, his falling like "the leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa." The mysteries of ancient faiths, the oracles of the gods, the secrets of the under world, were whispered man from the leafy temples of Egeria, the sacred oaks of Dodona, and written on the sibylline leaves of nature everywhere. In the gardens and groves of Sophocles the heavenly muse decended to mortal man, and in the Arcadian forest the pipe of Pan first woke the world to tuneful melody. Woodland bowers for lovers, forest temples for gods, classic elms for scholars, aye, charter oaks for nations, and immemorial pines as sentinels of the ages, have been so much a part of the world's history that the best of life would seem to have been lost if simply the tree in the midst of all earth's gardens had been "caught away" from sinful man, though all the sweet flowers and grasses of the field had still remained to him. Beautiful glooms, soft drinks in the noonday fire, Virginal shy lights, Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades |