GOLDEN THOUGHTS.

WHICH FURNISH A THEME FOR REFLECTION, AND A TEXT FOR MENTAL DISCOURSE.

Habit:

The diminutive chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be felt, till they are too strong to be broken-Samuel Johnson.

Make sobriety a habit, and intemperance will be hateful; make prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will be as contrary to the nature of the child, grown or adult, as the most atrocious crimes are to any of us.-Lord Brougham.

Happiness:

I have now reigned about fifty years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen. O man! place not thy confidence in this present world!-The Caliph Abdalrahman.

Hatred:

Malice and hatred are very fretting, and apt to make our minds sore and uneasy.-Tillotson.

Health:

Health is, indeed, so necessary to all the duties as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly; and he that for a short gratification brings weakness and diseases upon himself, and for the pleasure of a few years passed in the tumults of diversion and clamors of merriment, condemns the maturer and more experienced part of his life to the chamber and the couch, may be justly reproached, not only as spendthrift of his happiness, but as a robber of the public; as a wretch that has voluntarily disqualified himself for the business of his station, and refused that part which Providence assigns him in the general task of human nature.— Samuel Johnston.

Heaven:

Few, without the hope of another life, would think it worth their while to live above the allurements of sense.-Atterbury.

History:

What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies, and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.-Paley.

Imagination:

By imagination a man in a dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with scenes and landscapes more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole compass of nature.-Addison.

Idleness:

Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is but the devil's home for temptation, and unprofitable, distracting musings.-Baxter.

The idle, who are neither wise for this world nor the next, are emphatically fools at large.-Tillotson.

Inclination:

Almost every one has a predominant inclination, to which his other desires and inclinations submit, and which governs him, though perhaps with some intervals, through the whole course of his life.Hume.

Industry:

I persuade myself that the bountiful and gracious Author of man's being and faculties, and all things else, delights in the beauty of his creation, and is well pleased with the industry of man in adorning the earth with beautiful cities and castles, with pleasant villages and country houses, with regular gardens and orchards, and plantations of all sorts of shrubs, and herbs, and fruits, for meat, medicine, or moderate delight; with shady woods and groves, and walks set with rows of elegant trees; with pastures clothed with flocks, and valleys covered over with corn, and meadows burthened with grass, and whatever else differenceth a civil and well cultivated region from a barren and desolate wilderness.-Ray.

Ingratitude:

Ingratitude is abhorred by God and man.— L'Estrange.

There is not any one vice incident to the mind of man against which the world has raised such a loud and universal outcry as against ingratitude.-South.

Innocence:

To dread no eye, and to suspect no tongue, is the great prerogative of innocence. But guilt has always its horrors and solicitudes; and, to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those to whom nothing could give influence or weight, but their power of betraying.— Samuel Johnson.

Jealousy:

The jealous man wishes himse a kind of deity to the person he loves; he would be the only person in her thoughts.—Addison.

Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exacts the hardest service and pays the littlest wages. Its service is to watch the success of our enemy; its wages, to be sure of it.-Colton.

Jesting:

Take heed of jesting; many have been ruined by it. It is hard to jest and not sometimes jeer too, which oftentimes sinks deeper than was intended or expected.-Fuller.

FAITH.

RICHARD H. DANA.

If man would but his finer nature learn,
And not in life fantastic lose the sense

Of simpler things; coula Nature's features stern
Teach him the thoughtful; then, with soul intense,
I should not yearn for God to take me hence,
But bear my lot, albeit in spirit bowed,
Remembering, humbly, why it is, and whence.

BEHAVIOUR.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

The soul which animates nature is not less significantly published in the figure, movement, and gesture of animated bodies, than in its last vehicle of articulated speech. This silent and subtile language is Manners; not what, but how. Life expresses. A statue has no tongue, and needs none. Good tableaux do not need declamation. Nature tells every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time, by form, attitude, gesture, mien, face, and parts of the face, and by the whole action of the machine. The visible carriage or action of the individual, as resulting from his organization and his will combined, we cali manners. What are they but thought entering the hands and feet, controlling the movements of the body, the speech and behaviour?

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love-now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows. Manners are very communicable; men catch them from each other. Consuelo, in the romance, boasts of the lessons she had given the nobles in manners, on the stage; and, in real life, Talma taught Napoleon the arts of behaviour. Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage of a palace, betters the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode. The power of manners is incessant-an element as unconcealable as fire. The nobility cannot in any country be disguised, and no more in a republic or a democracy than in a kingdom. No man can resist their influence. There are certain manners which are learned in good society, of that force that, if a person have them, he or she must be considered, and in everywhere welcome, though without beauty, wealth, or genius. Give a boy aadress and accomDushments, and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. He has not the trouble of earning or owning them: they solicit him to enter and possess. We send girls of a timid, retreating disposition to the boarding-school, to the riding

school, to the ball-room, or wheresoever they can come into acquaintance and nearness of leading per. sons of their own sex; where they might learn address, and see it near at hand. The power of a woman of fashion to lead, and also to daunt and repel, derives from their belief that she knows resources and behaviour not known to them; but when these have mastered her secret, they learn to confront her, and recover their self-possession.

Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. People who would obtrude, now do not obtrude. The mediocre circle learns to demand that which belongs to a high state of nature or of culture. Your manners are always under examination, and by committees little expected-a police in citizen's clothesbut are awarding or denying you very high prizes when you least think of it.

We talk much of utilities-but 'tis our manners that associate us. In hours of business we go to him who knows, or has, or does this or that which we want, and we do not let our taste or feeling stand in the way. But this activity over, we return to the indolent state, and wish for those we can be at ease with; those who will go where we go, whose manners do not offend us, whose social tone chimes with ours. When we reflect on their persuasive and cheering force; how they recommend, prepare, and draw people together; how, in all clubs, manners make the members; how manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that, for the most part, his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries manners; when we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high lessons and inspiring tokens of character they convey; and what divination is required in us for the reading of this fine telegraph, we see what range the subject has, and what rela tions to convenience, power and beauty.

Their first service is very low-when they are the minor morals: but 'tis the beginning of civility-to make us, I mean, endurable to each other. We prize them for their rough-plastic, abstergent force; to get people out of the quadruped state; to get them washed, clothed, and set up on end; to slough their animal husks and habits; compel them to be clean; overawe their spite and meanness, teach them to stifle the base, and choose the generous expression, and make them know how much happier the gener ous behaviours are.

Bad behaviour the laws cannot reach. Society is infested with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom a public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradicters and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight: I have seen men who neigh like a horse when you contradict them, or say something which they do not understand; then the over-bold, who make their

own invitation to your hearth; the persevering talker, who gives you his society in large, saturating doses; the pitiers of themselves-a perilous class; the frivolous Asmodeus, who relies on you to find him in ropes of sand to twist; the monotones; in short, every stripe of absurdity; these are social inflictions. which the magistrate cannot cure or defend you from, and which must be intrusted to the restraining force of custom, and proverbs, and familiar rules of behaviour impressed on young people in their schooldays.

Manners are partly factitious, but, mainly, there must be capacity for culture in the blood. Else all culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice in favor of blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and monarchical fabrics of the Old World, has some reason in common experience. Every man-mathematician, artist, soldier, or merchant-looks with confidence for some traits and talents in his own child, which he would not dare to presume in the child of a stranger. The Orientalists are very orthodox on this point. "Take a thorn-bush," said the Emir Abd-el-Kader, “and sprinkle it for a whole year with water;—it will yield nothing but thorns. Take a date-tree, leave it without culture, and it will always produce dates. Nobility is the date-tree, and the Arab populace is a bush of thorns."

A main fact in the history of manners is the wonderful expressiveness of the human body. If it were made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts were written on steel tablets within, it could not publish more truly its meaning than now. Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behaviour. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces, which expose the whole movement. They carry the liquor of life flowing up and down in these beautiful bottles, and announcing to the curious how it is with them. The face and eyes reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul, or through how many forms it has already ascended. It almost violates the proprieties, if we say above the breath here what the confessing eyes do not hesitate to utter to every street passenger.

The

Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far seems imperfect. In Siberia a late traveler found men who could see the satellites of Jupiter with their unarmed eye. In some respects the animals excel us. birds have a longer sight, beside the advantage by their wings of a higher observatory. A cow can bid her calf, by secret sigual, probably of the eye, to run away, or to lie down and hide itself. The jockeys say of certain horses, that "they look over the whole ground." The out-door life, and hunting, and labor, give equal vigor to the human eye. A farmer looks out at you as strong as the horse; his eye.beam is like the stroke of a staff. An eye can threaten like a loaded and leveled gun, or can insult like hissing

or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kind ness, it can make the heart dance with joy.

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind, When a thought strikes us, the eyes fix, and remain gazing at a distance; in enumerating the names of persons or of countries, as France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, the eyes wink at each new name. There is no nicety of learning sought by the mind which the eyes do not vie in acquiring. "An artist," said Michael Angelo, "must have his measuring tools not in the hand but in the eye;" and there is no ei d to the catalogue of its performances, whether in indolent vision (that of health and beauty), or in strained vision (that of art and labor).

Eyes are bold as lions-roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you, in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another, through them! The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house, between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder. The communication by the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature. We look into the eyes to know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful confession what inhabitant is there. The revelations are sometimes terrific. The confession of a low, usurping davil is there made, and the observer shall seem to feel the stirring of owls, and bats, and horned hoofs, where he looked for innocence and simplicity. 'Tis remarkable, too, that the spirit that appears at the windows of the house does at once invest himself in a new form of his own to the mind of the beholder.

over.

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first. If the man is off his center, the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of your companion whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it. There is a look by which a man shows he is going to say a good thing, and a look when he has said it. Vain and forgotten are all the fine offers and offices of hospitality, if there is no holiday in the eye. How many furtive inclinations avowed by the eye, though dissembled by the lips! One comes away from a company in which, it may easily happen, he has said nothing, and no important remark has been addressed to him, and yet, if in sympathy with the society, he shall not have a sense of this fact, such a stream of life has been flowing into him and out from him through the eyes. There