be won or lost. Of how many a man can we say, he would have done more had he done less! I do not refer to the waste of working hours on mere accomplishments, or even on amusements that carry no recuperative influence, as when the making of a great lawyer or a fine scholar passes off into an expert chessplayer, or the like, but to the more legitimate dispersion of power over a surface that makes it thin. Had even that marvelous genius, Da Vinci, been content to demit his undoubted gifts as civil and military engineer or as architect, to say nothing of master of ceremonies and boon companion, the world might have been the richer by many a work like the Last Supper and that modeled but unwrought statue. It was the exclusion of such wasteful ambitions by his great contemporary and rival, wide as was his remaining sphere, that has left us Moses and David, Night and Morning, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, and the dome of St. Peter's.

Much more must the ordinary worker, in these days of multiplicity and infinitude, learn self-mastery for the mastery of his appointed work. While the world opens vastly wider, the powers of man are no greater. With the accumulation of new material and the multiplication of appliances, it has been well said by Frederic Harrison: "We do not multiply the years of life, the days in the year, nor the hours in the day; nor do we multiply the powers of thought and endurance. We multiply our difficulties and doubts." The problems are many, the man but one. Sidney Smith did indeed

say of a brilliant woman: "Lady Holland is not one woman, but many. Read the Riot Act, and you will see them disperse." It was witty and gallant, and not much more hyperbolical than when Peel said: "I never forget anything I wish to remember;" and Macaulay rejoined: "I never forget anything."

Human faculties are limited. Life is short and art is long and longer. When launched on the ocean of life each must choose his port and hold hard his helm. One limitation indeed is imperative - that all specialism shall stand on the basis of a previous liberalism and shall never cut the bonds of friendly alliance. But thenceforth the career controls, and "this one thing we do." The reading, the thinking, the interest, the observation, the selection, the association, the recollection of the minister, the lawyer, the physician, the journalist, the engineer, run on lines which may touch and cross but never long coincide.

Each to his one
Nature herself is

thing. If to everything, to nothing. here one great object lesson. The tenants of the earth, the water, and the air fulfill their several functions. Coaxed or forced away, how eagerly they revert to their sphere, method, and type. You pause in some sumptuous park or garden - it may be Chatsworth or Kensington. On these same acres, in this same soil, air, and sunlight, see the cedar, the oak, the elm, the willow, and the maple; the rhododendron and the oleander, the pansy and the peony, the carnation, the tuberose, tulip, gladiolus, and orchid, lilies of every shape, roses of every hue, fruits of every size and flavor; perchance

the belladonna and the nightshade, and thousands of others each surely and steadily elaborating its own several form, color, juice, flavor, and odor, and never faltering or mistaking in its work-and see here, each one his symboled life. True to our fitness, our sphere, our function. But alas for human nature,

"Weak and irresolute is man; the purpose of to-day, Woven with pains into his plan, to-morrow rends away."

V. The final and crowning guaranty of a noble life is elevation of aim. "I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling." It is the aim that makes the value of the shot. Is it a sparrow or an eagle? Is it a concentration of every human energy in pursuits worthy or unworthy of the highest humanity? The absorption of Pilgrim with his eyes on the far-off shining light, or of the man with the muck-rake looking only downward?

There are successes in life which are failures of the life. There are pursuits in which the greatness of the skill and energy expended signalizes the folly. The brighter the powers, the sadder the misuse. No lacquer or gilding can long disguise the hollowness beneath. No doubt certain spheres and stations and their occupants are invested with an almost blinding glitter and glamor to the common eye. They spread like some comet's train over half the heavens, and prove as thin and as evanescent. A keen satirist has drawn the portrait of one who, before he was a monarch, claimed to be "the first gentleman of Europe": "I look through

his whole life, and I find nothing but a bow and a grin. I take him to pieces and I find silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and a blue ribbon, a pocket handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefit's best nutty brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth, and a huge black stock, under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing." It was a career as much lower as it was meaner than that of his rival and abused friend Brummel, who gave all his mind and life to the perfection of his dress, spent hours on the tie of his cravat, and was ruined by his laundry bill. Pity that you cannot always look beneath the padding of life as did the satirist beneath the padding of George Fourth. Why can we not stand outside for a little, or underneath, and see it as it is? Before plunging into the turmoil, it is worth while for a young man to pause and consider well what life is worth living. Do the experiences of the past with all their recorded dissatisfactions and disappointments encourage him to choose any sphere of labor or to labor in any sphere with the sole and single purpose of concentrated selfseeking? Nay, but he will find at last that he has reversed the very order of nature, spinning indeed his cocoon, but perishing within as a grub. It has been the same story from Solomon to Chesterfield, from Saul to the last Napoleon:

"We barter life for pottage; sell true bliss

For wealth and power, for pleasure or renown;
Thus, Esau like, our father's blessing miss,

Then wash with fruitless tears our faded crown."

It is the experience from which come all these pitiful wails about human life: "Vanity of vanities"; "When I consider life, 't is all a cheat"; "Life is a jest, and all things show it"; "Life is tedious as a twice-told. tale"; "Life is a short summer"; "O life, thou art a galling load."

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his brief hour on the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
And signifying nothing."

How like a voice from a different universe a voice from heaven-sounds the Pauline strain: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." From the standpoint of the men that make them, those indictments are verily true. A life apart from God and ignoring our higher nature and our immortality is nothing but vanity. Humanity in its sober hours responds. The popularity and power of Longfellow's Psalm of Life lie not in any poetic beauty, but in its terse, prosaic truth.

It is well in choosing the life-work to seek that which has most for mind and heart and the closest hold on the highest welfare of man. But there is no walk of life in which we may not walk with God, no honest calling that may not be his call. A true manhood will always be larger than any vocation or avocation and will be neither bound nor bounded by its lines. There have been multitudes of spiritual men in the most mechanical of callings - farmers who have been God's