a magnet draws a needle. Success did not bring him happiness, except in
the sense that it relieved him from money cares.

People of coarse temperament only can find real satisfaction in worldly
triumphs, and eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow they die! Men like
Geoffrey soon learn that this also is vanity. On the contrary, as his
mind grew more and more wearied with the strain of work, melancholy took
an ever stronger hold of it. Had he gone to a doctor, he might have been
told that his liver was out of order, which was very likely true. But
this would not mend matters. "What a world," he might have cried, "what
a world to live in when all the man's happiness depends upon his liver!"
He contracted an accursed habit of looking on the black side of things;
trouble always caught his eye.

It was no wonderful case. Men of large mind are very rarely happy men.
It is your little animal-minded individual who can be happy. Thus women,
who reflect less, are as a class much happier and more contented than
men. But the large-minded man sees too far, and guesses too much of
what he cannot see. He looks forward, and notes the dusty end of his
laborious days; he looks around and shudders at the unceasing misery of
a coarse struggling world; the sight of the pitiful beggar babe craving
bread on tottering feet, pierces his heart. He cannot console himself
with a reflection that the child had no business to be born, or that if
he denuded himself of his last pound he would not materially help the
class which bred it.

And above the garish lights of earthly joys and the dim reek of earthly
wretchedness, he sees the solemn firmament that veils his race's
destiny. For such a man, in such a mood, even religion has terrors as
well as hopes, and while the gloom gathers about his mind these are
with him more and more. What lies beyond that arching mystery to whose
horizon he daily draws more close--whose doors may even now be opening
for him? A hundred hands point out a hundred roads to knowledge--they
are lost half way. Only the cold spiritual firmament, unlit by any
guiding stars, unbrightened by the flood of human day, and unshadowed
by the veils of human night, still bends above his head in awful
changelessness, and still his weary feet draw closer to the portals of
the West.

It is very sad and wrong, but it is not altogether his fault; it is
rather a fault of the age, of over-education, of over-striving to be
wise. Cultivate th