“I wish you could teach me the art.”

“It is,” said I, “to exercise the faith and the hope of a Christian, humbly to regard this life as what it is,—­a scene of discipline and schooling, a pilgrimage to a better.  It is an old remedy, but it has been often tried; and to millions of our race has made this world more than tolerable, and death tranquil, nay, triumphant.  Do you remember Schiller’s ’Walk among the Linden-Trees’?”

“Perfectly well.”

“Do you not remember how the two youths differ in their estimate of the beautiful in nature?  ‘Is it possible,’ says Edwin, ’you can thus turn from the cup of joy, sparkling and overflowing as it is?’—­’Yes,’ said Wollmar, ’when one finds a spider in it; and why not?  In your eyes, to be sure, Nature decks herself out like a rosy-checked maiden on her bridal day.  To me she appears an old, withered beldame, with sunken eyes, furrowed cheeks, and artificial ornaments in her hair.  How she seems to admire herself in this her Sunday finery!  But it is the same worn and ancient garment, put off and on some hundreds of thousands of times.’  But how natural is the explanation of all given at the beautiful close of the dialogue!  ‘Here,’ said the jocund Edwin, ‘I first met my Juliet.’—­’And it was under these linden-trees,’ says Wollmar, ‘that I lost my Laura’ It was their mood of mind, and not the outward world, that made all the difference.  All nature, innocent thing! must consent to take her hue from it.  You have, I fear, lost your Laura,”—­simply alluding to his early faith; “or shall I suppose, from your present mood, that you have just met with your Juliet?” I spoke, of course, of his philosophy.

He was looking out of the window; but on my turning my gaze towards him, I saw such a look of peculiar anguish, that I felt I had inadvertently touched a terrible chord indeed.  I turned the conversation hastily, by remarking (almost without thinking of what I said) on the beautiful contrast between the light blue of the sky and the green of the lawn and trees; and proceeded to remark on the degree in which the mere organic or sensational pleasures of vision formed an ingredient in the pleasurable associations of the complex “beautiful.”

He gradually resumed conversation; and we discussed the subject of the “beautiful” for some time.  Yet I know not how it was, nor can I trace the steps by which we deviated,—­only that Rousseau’s summer -day dreams on the Lake of Bienne was a link in the chain,—­we somehow soon found ourselves on the brink of the great controversy respecting the “origin of Evil.”  “I have read many books on that subject,” said I; “but I intend to read no more; and I should think you have had enough of them.”

“Why, yes,” said he, laughing; “whatever philosophers may have thought of the origin of evil, it is a great aggravation of it to read their speculations.  The best thing I know on the subject—­and it exhausts it—­is half a dozen lines in ‘Robinson Crusoe.’”