"Gravity ... I mean simply that grave and serious way of looking at life which, while it never repels the true light-heartedness of pure and trustful hearts, welcomes into a manifest sympathy the souls of men who are oppressed and burdened, anxious and full of questions which for the time at least have banished all laughter from their faces.... Gravity has a delicate power of discrimination. It attracts all that it can help, and it repels all that could harm it or be harmed by it. It admits the earnest and simple with a cordial welcome. It shuts out the impertinent and insincere inexorably. "The gravity of which I speak is not inconsistent with the keenest perception of the ludicrous side of things. It is more than consistent with--it is even necessary to--humour. Humour involves the perception of the true proportions of life.... It has softened the bitterness of controversy a thousand times. You cannot encourage it too much. You cannot grow too familiar with the books of all ages which have in them the truest humour, for the truest humour is the bloom of the highest life. Read George Eliot and Thackeray, and, above all, Shakespeare. They will help you to keep from extravagances without fading into insipidity. They will preserve your gravity while they save you from pompous solemnity." PHILLIPS BROOKS. Beauties of Nature NOVEMBER 29 "There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us." GEORGE ELIOT. "That man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset, while revolutions vex the world." THOREAU. "So then believe that every bird that sings, And every flower that stars the elastic sod, And every thought the happy summer brings To the pure spirit is a word of God." COLERIDGE. Sense of the Beautiful NOVEMBER 30 "No man receives the true culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and I know of no condition in life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is cheapest and the most to hand; and it seems to me to be the most important to those conditions where coarse labour tends to give a grossness to the mind. From the diffusion of the sense of beauty in ancient Greece, and of the taste for music in modern Germany, we learn that the people at large may partake of refined gratifications which have hitherto been thought to be necessarily restricted to a few." CHANNING.