e one finds as much delight in his kite or drum, as the other in
striking the springs of enterprise or soaring on the wings of fame.
After all, happiness is the rule, not the exception, even in the hearts
that beat in the crowded city; and its great elements are as common as
the air, and the sunshine, and free movement, and good health. And what
the fortunate may seem to gain in variety of methods, may only be
unconscious devices to simulate or recover that natural relish which
others have never lost. And no one doubts that the great dispensations
of life, the events that make epochs in our fleeting years, cleave
through all the strata of outward difference, and lay bare the core of
our one humanity. Sickness! does it not make Dives look very much like
Lazarus, and show our common weakness, and reveal the common marvel of
this "harp of thousand strings?" And sorrow! it veils all faces, and
bows all forms alike, and sends the same shudder through the frame, and
casts the same darkness upon the walls, and peals forth in the same
dirge of maternal agony by the dead boy's cradle in the sumptuous
chamber, and the baby's last sleep on its bed of straw. And Death! how
wonderfully it makes them all alike who in the street wore such various
garments, and had such distinct aims, and were whirled apart in such
different orbits! Ah! our essential humanity comes out in those composed
forms and still features. Those divergent currents have carried them out
upon the same placid sea at last; and the same solemn light streams
upon the clasped hands and the uplifted faces. We don't mind the drapery
so much then. It seems a very superficial matter beside the silent and
starless mystery that enfolds them all.

In what I have thus said I do not mean to maintain that outward
conditions are nothing. I think they are a great deal; and we do right
in striving to improve them; in escaping the evil, and seeking to secure
the good that pertains to them. But, I repeat, when we come to the
essential humanity, to the real discipline and substance of life, we
find the same great features; and so this lesson of the street may help
explain the problem suggested by the other; may reconcile each of us to
our condition in the crowd, and direct our attention to substantial
results.

But, again, the street, with its processions and activities, teaches us
that much in human life is merely _phenomenal_, merely _appears_. We
enter into this truth by a very com