It is not good for us to have all that we value of worldly material things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value can be invested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are better; but even jewels and trinkets are sometimes to be preferred to mere hard money. Lands and tenements are good, as involving duties; but still what is valuable in the market sense should sometimes take the ideal and the beautiful form, and be dear and lovely and valuable for its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think the character would be apt to deteriorate when all its material possessions take the form of money, and when money becomes valuable for its own sake, or as the mere instrument or representative of power. [Illustration] 4. We are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman, the blind, deaf, and dumb girl, that her instructor once endeavoured to explain the difference between the material and the immaterial, and used the word “soul.” She interrupted to ask, “What is soul?” “That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,——” “And _aches_?” she added eagerly. [Illustration] 5. I was reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell’s Life of Johnson that “it is a theory which every one knows to be _false in fact_, that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery.” I should say that all my experience teaches me that the position is not false but true: that virtue _does_ produce happiness, and vice _does_ produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By _happiness_, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity. By _virtue_, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may not be rewarded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue. Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with benevolent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of the highest conscience and the highest sympathy fulfils my notion of virtue. Strength is essential to it; weakness incompatible with it. Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are predominant; the whole being is in that state of harmony which I call happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is always a glimpse of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity of being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God.