the suffering that they meet. The first way gives you the most of hard work to do. The second way, by dulling your sensibilities, makes you less alive to the pleasures that are to be gained in the company of happy men. The stern man, who has seen so much suffering as to be indifferent to it, may be less alive to the bliss of sympathy that gentler natures come to know, in refined and peaceful society. By far the most inviting way is the third. It prevents you from growing callous, cold, and harsh. It leaves you sensitive, appreciative, tender-hearted, freshly sympathetic, an admirable and humane being. But it also saves you from the pangs that to refined natures must be the most atrocious, the pangs of contemplating a world of sorrow which your best efforts can but very imperfectly help. People with a delicate sense of the beautiful surely cannot endure to go about seeing all sorts of filthy and ugly miseries, and if they can endure it, will they not be much happier, as well as more refined, more delicate in taste, much higher in the scale of beautiful cultivation, if they do not try to endure it, but keep themselves well surrounded by happy and ennobling companions? For the sight of pain is apt to make you coarse; it might degrade you even to the level of the peevish sufferer himself. Does a refined soul desire that? No one is a duller, a less stimulating, a less ennobling companion, than the average man when he is suffering atrociously. Pain brings out his native brutishness. He is abject, he curses, he behaves perhaps like a wild beast. Or he lies mute and helpless, showing no interest in what you do for
