enough, and may not be interfered with; but streetwhistling is an abomination, and cannot be any longer permitted. That's the long and the short of the

matter.

66

A

"SAUCY DOUBTS AND FEARS.”

SOLDIER and afeared." Such was the taunt addressed by Lady Macbeth to her trembling lord, and never did wife aim at her husband's heart a shaft of more poignant sarcasm. Yet the contrast of ideas, however ignoble in fancy, is by no means without warrant in fact. There are well-attested cases, not a few, of soldiers having turned and fled when first they went into action, who, after their ears had grown "more Irish and less nice" to the report of firearms, walked without blenching to the cannon's mouth and performed prodigies of valor. "Who's afraid?" is a familiar interrogatory, to which the honest answer is "everybody." "Fear," says Dr. Johnson, "is one of the passions of human nature of which it is impossible to divest it." You remember that the Emperor Charles V., when he read upon the tombstone of a Spanish nobleman, “Here lies one who never knew fear," replied, with sly humor, "Then he never snuffed a candle with his fingers." The fact is that we are all "bound in to saucy doubts and fears" of some sort or another, and the very man who is as brave as a lion in great emergencies may be as timid as a dove on occasions so trivial as to provoke the laughter of spectators. This is doubtless what is meant by the homely old proverb, "There is a skeleton

in every cupboard." I know a man six-foot-two in his stockings, who won the Victoria Cross for exceeding great valor on the field of battle, but who would run into a rat hole from a wife who hardly reaches his elbow. Another man know I who has done heroic things in his time, such as plunging into angry seas and houses on fire for the rescue of a fellow creature, and who, I do verily believe, would face the Devil in brass for any good cause, yet has he such a horror of a dog that he would not stay in the same room with one for any earthly consideration. Men who would scorn to turn their backs upon a foe of flesh and blood have grown pale before now at the thought of a ghost. We have the authority of Augustus Cæsar for the statement that Suetonius was afraid to be in the dark without a companion. Every one's experience will supply him, either from his own knowledge of himself, or from his observation of his neighbors, with instances of timidity equally irrational, though in both quarters there may be no lack of true courage in the presence of real danger.

Nor is it alone the possibility of our own little candle of a life being swiftly blown out that creates uneasiness even in the hearts of the valiant. We fear more for others than for ourselves, and are often at a loss to account for our apprehensions. Like meteoric stones falling, we know not wherefore, out of the azure sky, are the thoughts of coming sorrow with which the heart is suddenly darkened and oppressed, at the moment, it may be, when the horizon of our destiny looks cloudless. We pause for the footfall of fate on our ear "Nescio quid mihi animus præsagit mali." What lover is there, or husband or wife, or father or mother, or

overcast.

friend, endowed with any gift of sensibility, who, gazing on the object of fond affection, has not at times been haunted by the thought, the dark, disheartening thought, that the Beloved may die. 66 In our own case, the readiness is all," as Hamlet says, but it is no such easy matter to give up those who are dearer to us than life. There is no anguish more bitter than that which we experience in the very contemplation of such a contingency. But apart and distinct from these tragical imaginings of supreme woe are the gloomy forebodings of minor disasters, wherewith our fancies are occasionally affrighted. You cannot, for the life of you, understand the depression with which your spirit is at times You may ascribe it to the weather, or to some familiar physiological cause; but the true origin of it belongs to our immortal being, and like it baffles comprehension. A sudden sense of incapacity seizes the most gifted minds. The pencil of the finest painter sheds no color; the pen of the noblest writer refuses its office; the orator is dumb; the musician knows no touch of melody; the greatest of actors surrenders his inspiration to stage-fright. "Our sensibilities are so acute, the fear of being silent makes us mute." And it is worthy of remark, and may be stated for the refutation of the vulgar and supercilious, that the bravest and best natures are precisely those which suffer most acutely from the visitation of these "saucy doubts and fears." A dullard is easily pleased, so cold is his imagination, and so tenantless is his mind; but the truly gifted and highly cultured make to themselves lofty ideals of merit, and however they may delight others, rarely succeed in satisfying themselves. They are modest, not because they may not fulfil your concep

tions of excellence, but because they cannot realize their own. It continually happens that men of this poetic temperament mistrust themselves, and are haunted with a certain indefinable presentment of coming calamity. So it was in varying senses and degrees with Pope, Gray, Cowper, Byron, Moore, and Mangan.

D'ailleurs there is much comfort in the thought that our doubts are frequently but shadows, and that Heaven disappoints our fears oftener, far oftener, than our hopes.

Mental superiority has its penalties as well as its privileges, and among those penalties is unquestionably to be classed a degree of sensitiveness to which meaner natures are strangers. The higher the organization, the keener will be the susceptibility to disheartening influences. It is with men as with the animals whom we are pleased to designate as the "lower." A racehorse, a true "blood," is the most nervous of living creatures. On the slightest excitement he quivers in every nerve and fibre, while a dull Flemish cart-horse plods sluggishly along, uncaring for an earthquake. I have known many men of many ranks and races, but I never knew a man worth his salt who was not in some sense nervous." The most heroic are oftentimes the most nervous. A man of brilliant imagination will doubtless invest an alarming occasion with terrors more than real, but it by no means follows that he will be less ready than your muddy-mettled rascal to confront true danger; on the contrary, that very rapidity and brightness of intellect which exaggerated the perils will probably supply resources of deliverance. Bravery consists not in being insensible to fear, but rather in retaining such self-possession in danger as will enable

66

you to meet the emergency, and present a valiant front to adverse fortune. But the fancy is easily distressed, and very wonderful is it to think what trivial matters will suffice to alarm it. To some people, celerity of motion is very disquieting; and for my own poor part, I am fain to confess that I do not feel particularly comfortable when travelling by express at the rate of a mile a minute. A much lower rate of speed alarmed a timid passenger by the York Mail in the good old coaching days. "Oh! Mr. Coachman," she inquired, "is there any fear?" "Plenty of fear, ma'am," replied the Jehu, "but no danger;" which was reassuring. There are people of a highly imaginative type who, whether at home or abroad, and on whatsoever pursuit intent, would seem to be in constant communication with some other world than this :

"They hear a voice you cannot hear,

Which says they must not stay;
They see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons them away."

Certain hours of the day are more promotive than others of uneasy sensations. In the dead waste and middle of the night ghosts are wont to walk. At early dawn, the fancy sometimes plays strange freaks, and in the "dubia lux" of twilight the dim outlines of things assume fantastic shapes. Night, too, has her fears, and the least imaginative of us, musing alone in a dark gallery of a country-house, may have tremulous thoughts, not unlike those that disquieted the mind of Don Juan under like circumstances :

"As Juan mused on mutability,

Or on his mistress-terms synonymous

No sound except the echo of his sigh

Or step ran sadly through that antique house;