“Yet have they special pleasures, even mirth, By those undreamt of who have only trod Life’s valley smooth; and if the rolling earth To their nice ear have many a painful tone, They know man does not live by joy alone, But by the presence of the power of God.” MILNES. “But here we are;--that is a great fact; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself is here; and art and nature, hope and dread, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.” EMERSON. It is harder to be brief about our gains and privileges than about our peculiar troubles: but I must try to be so; for the discoveries we make, though to us all glowing with freshness and beauty, are, to those who merely receive them, as trite as any old moralities whatever. One great and strange blessing to us is, the abolition of the future--of our own future in this life. It is commonly thought a chief privilege of childhood, that it is passed without thought of the future--that the present is all in all. I doubt the truth of this. My own experience in childhood was of a painful and incessant longing for the future--a longing which enhanced all its innumerable pains, and embittered many of its pleasures--a longing for strength of body and of mind, for independence of action--for an escape, in short, from the conditions of childhood. The privilege which I then missed I have found now. Let it be a comfort to all sorrowing friends of those who are under any sort of doom without an assigned period to know, that in such cases the sense of doom vanishes. When the future becomes a blank to us, it becomes presently invisible. And when we sustain this change we do not contract in our desires and interests, but, I humbly hope, the contrary. The thoughts which stretched forwards, with eagerness and anxiety, now spread themselves abroad, more calmly and with more disinterestedness. There is danger of our losing sympathy with the young, the healthy, the ambitious; for we soon require to be reminded of those states of mind, and those classes of interests which involve ambition, or any kind of personal regard to the future: but, if we can preserve these sympathies, it does appear to me that the change is, to ourselves, pure gain. The image of five, ten, twenty years of our present life, or decline into deeper suffering, ending in death, makes absolutely no impression upon us. We have not the slightest movement of a wish that it were otherwise;--we do not turn our heads half round to see if there be no way of escape: and this is because our interests are all occupied with immediate and pressing objects, in which we have ascertained our true life to consist. Of these objects we would not surrender one for the permission to go back to the most brilliant point