kindness, and were heartily and
gratefully enjoyed. Do you remember in the "Daisy Chain," how Ethel says,
after the picnic, that the big attempts at pleasure generally go wrong,
and that the true pleasures of life are the little unsought joys that come
in the natural course of things? Dr. May disliked hearing her so wise at
her age, but I think it must have been rather a comfort to Ethel to have
found it out. No thought of that kind damps your pleasure when the dance
or the picnic turn out a great success! And when they do not, it is nice
to feel there are other things in life. Every one knows how often
something goes wrong at a big pleasure; the right people are not there, or
your dress is not quite right; you are tired, or you say the wrong thing;
while, if you get much pleasure, a certain monotony is soon felt, and you
envy the vivid enjoyment of the girl who scarcely ever has a treat.

It stands to reason, that if you are deliberately arranging to get
pleasure, and plenty of it, you cannot (from a purely pleasure point of
view) enjoy it as much as if your life consisted of duties, and your
pleasures came by the way. But there is a deeper reason why a life of
amusement fails to amuse. It is not only that we are so made that nearly
all our sensations of pleasure depend on novelty, the keenness wearing off
if a sensation is repeated.

The reason lies in a fact which militates against the Pleasure-seeker's
foundation idea:--the fact that we are made for something else than
pleasure, failing which we remain unsatisfied. "There is in man a HIGHER
than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof
find Blessedness."

Here is the point I should like you to think clearly out for yourselves.
Fifty years ago, Carlyle taught this truth as with thunder from Sinai. Let
us imbue our minds with his passionate scorn for those who come into this
noble world to suck sweets,--to have "a good time." "Sartor Resartus," one
of the Battle-cries of Life, and "Past and Present," which has small mercy
for idlers and pleasure-seekers, are character-making books:--

"There went to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran,"

and there also go, to the making of man and woman, certain books.

These may vary in each case and in generation. Tom Brown and Mr. Knowles'
"King Arthur" may not do for you what they did for me; "Sesame and
Lilies," "Past and Present," Emerson's "Twe