discern grades of character through styles of manners, inspired to admire the noble and loathe the base at the same time that they are deepened in their own desires for the divine prizes of beauty and joy. The most wholesome and triumphant art of the stage has always taught in its personifying revelation that the highest blessedness of human life is the perfect attunement of the natures of man and woman in a perfect love around which nature thrills and over which God smiles. No diviner lesson ever has been or ever will be taught on this earth. All other fruitions here are but preliminaries to this, all sacrifices penances for its failure, all diseases and crimes the fruit of its violation. In contrast with this glorious proper fulfilment of affection, wherever we look on the history of our race we find six great chronic tragedies which dramatic art has portrayed perhaps even more fully than it has the positive triumph itself. First, is the tragedy of the indifferent heart which neither receives nor gives nor possesses love. Thin and sour natures, frivolous, dry, cynical, or hard and arrogant,—the enchanted charms and mysteries of nature and humanity have no existence for them. They sit aloof and sneer, or plot and struggle and get money and win office, or eat and drink and joke and sleep and perish,—the amazing horrors and the entrancing delights of experience equally sealed books to them. They may attain incidental trifles, but, with their poor, shrivelled, loveless hearts, not attaining that for which man most was made, to the sorrowing gaze of nobler natures their earthly lot is a tragedy.