recise point. I never read of a nun's taking the veil without a
certain thrill of sympathy. To cut off one's hair, to take off and
cast from her, one by one, all one's trinkets and jewels, to lie down
and have the pall thrown over one, and feel one's self once for all
dead to the world,--I cannot help feeling as if this were real,
thorough, noble renunciation, and as if one might rise up from it with
a grand, calm consciousness of having risen to a higher and purer
atmosphere, and got above all the littlenesses and distractions that
beset us here. So I have heard charming young Quaker girls, who in
more thoughtless days indulged in what for them was a slight shading
of worldly conformity, say that it was to them a blessed rest when
they put on the strict, plain dress, and felt that they really had
taken up the cross and turned their backs on the world. I can conceive
of doing this, much more easily than I can of striking the exact line
between worldly conformity and noble aspiration, in the life I live
now."

"My dear child," said I, "we all overlook one great leading principle
of our nature, and that is, that we are made to find a higher pleasure
in self-sacrifice than in any form of self-indulgence. There is
something grand and pathetic in the idea of an entire self-surrender,
to which every human soul leaps up, as we do to the sound of martial
music.

"How many boys of Boston and New York, who had lived effeminate and
idle lives, felt this new power uprising in them in our war! How they
embraced the dirt and discomfort and fatigue and watchings and toils
of camp-life with an eagerness of zest which they had never felt in
the pursuit of mere pleasure, and wrote home burning letters that they
never were so happy in their lives! It was not that dirt and fatigue
and discomfort and watchings and weariness were in themselves
agreeable, but it was a joy to feel themselves able to bear all and
surrender all for something higher than self. Many a poor Battery
bully of New York, many a street rowdy, felt uplifted by the discovery
that he too had hid away under the dirt and dust of his former life
this divine and precious jewel. He leaped for joy to find that he too
could be a hero. Think of the hundreds of thousands of plain ordinary
workingmen, and of seemingly ordinary boys, who, but for such a
crisis, might have passed through life never knowing this to be in
them, and who courageously endured hunger and thirst and cold,