of both. Birds in the bush look better and sing more freely than they will ever do in the hand, and when we cannot catch them it is a pity if we cannot learn to sit down quietly and listen to them. And the birds of loveliest plumage and most exquisite song are those which cannot be enjoyed at all except in their native haunts. A lark in a cage charms us chiefly by recalling recollections of free larks, and humming-birds, we believe, have too exquisite a sense of the fitness of things ever to live in captivity. What indeed would they be to us without their liberty to flit from flower to flower? One might as well wish to tame a butterfly.
If we could weigh in a balance the things which can and those which cannot be appropriated, we might perhaps be surprised to find how very large a part of our happiness is derived from things which we cannot lose, because we can never possess them. Possession is of course a very vague word, capable of many different applications; but almost in proportion to the possibility and completeness of individual appropriation are the precariousness of our tenure and the weight of counterbalancing burdens. Sky, sea, and moorland, mountains and stars, music and poetry, will never fail, nor do they ever cost us an anxious thought, for they can never be ours. We had almost added flowers to the list; and all this is indeed true of the "jocund companies" of daffodils, and blue firmaments of wild hyacinths, and starry glades of wind-flowers, the sheets of heather and golden furze, and all the hosts of their wild compeers, who owe nothing to human care. It is even true, in a sense, of roses and lilies, jessamine and honeysuckles. But because these last are capable of becoming cherished nurslings, we cannot say of them that they never cost us an anxious thought. Other people's roses and our neighbor's lilies may give us unmixed pleasure; a purer, though less intense kind of pleasure than that which we derive from our own carefully nurtured plants. The most refined epicureanism would perhaps lead us to cultivate, above all, a taste for the thornless roses which blossom behind no garden hedge, for the unfading lilies which never grew on lawn or bed.
It is impossible to weigh the personal against the universal, the concrete possession against the abstract idea, and say from which the greatest enjoyment is derived in the long run; but certain it is that the one tends to displace the other. The growth of interest in what is universal and abstract is rarely very rapid or very marked in lives filled to the brim with strong personal interests. What we have called negative experience is the choicest soil in which it can be made to bloom. If privations have not been endured, or have not been sharply felt, the mind is hardly ever roused to the keenest admiration of which it is capable; enjoyment ties it down, and lulls it to sleep, and limits its range. Nothing so throws open the doors of the soul and so irresistibly lures it outwards as to have gazed long and steadfastly upon some great natural source of happiness, only to learn that it is forever beyond our grasp. Minds elevated enough to take such an experience kindly are thenceforward undisputed heirs of such happiness in all its forms. They may not grasp it, and yet it can never elude their grasp. They know better than to wish it reduced to the narrow limits of their own personal belongings, for their eyes are satisfied with its perpetual presence all around them. Pleasure for them is transmuted into beauty, possession into contemplation. And contemplation is the one satisfying joy belonging to this world, for it alone has upon it a touch of eternity.
THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.
One of the most interesting papers read in the Anthropological Section at the recent meeting of the British Association was by Professor Daniel Wilson, of Toronto, on the Canadian Indians. Professor Wilson showed that the Canadian Indians, instead of "melting away" before the civilized virtues and vices of the white man, have already been to a considerable extent absorbed, and the likelihood is that ultimately this absorption will be complete. At present, Professor Wilson maintains — and he has so mastered the subject that he has a right to speak — the blood of the so-called "red man" flows in the veins of every class of Canadian, from the highest to the lowest; and many of those who are treated by the government as "Indians" are as white as many of their "pale-faced" fellow-countrymen. This subject of the fate of the American Indian has been also engaging the attention of competent men in the United States, and the facts and statistics which have been collected appear to give the death-blow to the commonly accepted "blight" and "withering" theory.
