to be too openly impatient of the
more sedate and prosaic discourse of their elders; and then, too,
there is a time for all things; one cannot keep the mind always on the
strain; and the best and most beautiful things are apt to come in
glimpses and hints, and are not always arrived at by discussion and
argument.

There is a story of a great artist full of sympathy and kindness, to
whom in a single day three several people came to confide sad troubles
and trials. The artist told the story to his wife in the evening. He
said that he was afraid that the third of the visitors thought him
strangely indifferent and even unkind. "The fact was," he said, "that
my capacity for sympathy was really exhausted. I had suffered so much
from the first two recitals that I could not be sorry any more. I
_said_ I was sorry, and I _was_ sorry far down in my mind, but I could
not _feel_ sorry. I had given all the sympathy I had, and it was no
use going again to the well when there was no more water." This shows
that one cannot command emotion, and that one must not force even
thoughts of beauty upon others. We must bide our time, we must adapt
ourselves, and we must not be instant in season and out of season. Yet
neither must we be wholly at the mercy of moods. In religion, the
theory of liturgical worship is an attempt to realise that we ought to
practise religious emotion with regularity. We do not always feel we
are miserable sinners when we say so, and we sometimes feel that we
are when we do not say it; but it is better to confess what we know to
be true, even if at that moment we do not feel it to be true.

We ought not then always, out of modesty, to abstain from talking
about the things for which we care. A foolish shyness will sometimes
keep two sympathetic people from ever talking freely together of their
real hopes and interests. We are terribly afraid in England of what we
call priggishness. It is on the whole a wholesome tendency, but it is
the result of a lack of flexibility of mind. What we ought to be
afraid of is not seriousness and earnestness, but of solemnity and
pomposity. We ought to be ready to vary our mood swiftly, and even to
see the humorous side of sacred and beautiful things. The
oppressiveness of people who hold a great many things sacred, and
cannot bear that they should be jested about, is very great. There is
nothing that takes all naturalness out of intercourse more quickly
than the habit which some peo