A promise should be given with caution, and kept with care; it should be made with the heart and kept with the head. "The mind of a young creature," says Berkely, "can not remain empty; if you do not put into it that which is good, it will be sure to use even that which is bad." We all see at sunset the beautiful colors streaming all over the western sky, but no eyes can behold the hand that overturns the urns whence these streams are poured. We often live under a cloud, and it is well for us that we should do so. Uninterrupted sunshine would parch our hearts. We want shade and rain to cool and refresh them. Poverty is very terrible to you, and kills the soul in you sometimes; but it is the north wind that lashed men into vikings; it is the soft, luscious south wind that lulls to lotus dreams. There is nothing so valuable, and yet so cheap, as civility; you can almost buy land with it. It has been justly said nothing in man is so Godlike as doing good to our fellows.--_Selected_. Contentment swells a mite into a talent, and makes even the poor richer than the Indies.--_Addison_. Never was a sincere word utterly lost, never a magnanimity fell to the ground; there is some heart always to greet and accept it unexpectedly. There are people who often talk of the humbleness of their origin, when they are really ashamed of it, though vain of the talent which enabled them to emerge from it. A witty old deacon put it thus: "Now, brethren, let us get up a supper and eat ourselves rich. Buy your food, then give it to the church; then go and buy it back again; then eat it up, and your church debt is paid." Self-sacrifice is the essential mark of the Christian, and the absence of it is sufficient at once to condemn the man who calls himself by that name and yet has it not, and to declare that he has no right to it.--_Bolton_. There are many comfortable people in the world, but to call any man perfectly happy is an insult. Women often make light of ruin. Give them but the beloved objects, and poverty is but a trifling sorrow to bear.--_Thackeray_, Independence is a name for what no man possesses; nothing in the animate or inanimate world is more dependent than man. Wealth is to be used only as an instrument of action, not as the representative of civil honors and moral excellence.--_Jane Porter_. There is nothing purer, nothing warmer than our first friendship, our first love, our first striving after truth, our first feeling for nature.--_Jean Paul Richter_. Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably.--_Representative Men_. A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner. Neither do uninterrupted prosperity and success qualify a man for usefulness and happiness. The storms of adversity, like the storms of the ocean, arouse the faculties and excite the invention, prudence, skill and fortitude of the voyager.