tiger-like struggles of life. It is not because the former qualities are more respected than the latter, but because they are usually allied with others such as decision, promptness, and energy-without which worth is inoperative. A barking dog is more useful than a sleeping lion. As Ulysses says in "Troilus and Cressida,"

"A stirring dwarf we do allowance give
Before a sleeping giant.”

We all, in the depth of our heart, esteem the men of fine feelings, refined tastes, and shrinking modesty,

"Delicate spirits pushed away

In the hot press of noonday;"

the

"He

but the prizes of life are not won by such shy folk. who is silent," says Amiel, is forgotten; he who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow greater, becomes smaller; he who leaves off, gives up. To live is to achieve a perpetual triumph; it is to assert one's self against destruction, against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's physical being. It is to will without ceasing; or, rather, it is to refresh one's will day by day."

Was it Is suicide less suicide when it is slow, Suicide? when a man knowingly kills himself by a succession of acts, instead of by one blow? A great deal of sympathy has been expressed for an author, the late R. L. Stevenson, because he is supposed to have weakened his constitution by overwork; but, according to a writer in the Chicago" Open Court," the main cause of his death was probably his consumption of tobacco. Two years

before his death he confessed that his bill for cigars amounted to $450 a year; and during the last six months of his life he smoked an average of forty cigarettes per day, and often as many as eighty in twenty-four hours! Can any one wonder that this frightful habit induced chronic insomnia, to cure or lessen which he smoked all night, till narcosis of the brain brought on stupefaction and temporary loss of consciousness, for weeks his nearest approach to refreshing slumber? His physician warned him in vain that he was burning life's candle at both ends, for he tried to write in spite of his misery; but he stuck to nicotine as the only specific for his nervousness, with the result that was inevitable, his death a year afterwards.

Needless ONE of the marks of advancing civilization Noise. is the protest which men are beginning to make, in our large cities at least, against needless noise. Men are beginning to feel that it is a savage and barbarous taste which finds delight in it. Scientists affirm that the hundred noises in our large towns - even those of which we are not conscious when engaged in our daily occupations - all do more or less injury to the fine texture of the nerves. In London the street-cries are ceasing, and silence is coming to be recognized as conducive to both comfort and health. In this country, though we still submit to the clang of church-bells, the shriek of locomotives, and the hideous discords of hand-organs and street-bands, we are beginning to feel that they are both a nuisance and needless. The uproar of the night before the Fourth of July has been partially squelched, and possibly the bell-ringing on that day, and the 22d of February, and in Boston on Evacuation Day also, may ultimately be abandoned. Who

that loves quiet has not, for a moment, half wished on the last-named two days that Washington had been born on the 29th of February, and that he had not planted his cannon on Dorchester Heights?

In speaking of the peculiar conditions under which a man of rare genius perfects his creations, a recent writer compares the process to one of those delicate processes of crystallization so carefully watched over in the laboratory of the chemist, where an exactly even temperature must be preserved, and not so much as the lightest footfall jar the equilibrium of the liquid. Who can wonder that such men - or, indeed, that nearly all literary men, who have generally finely-strung and exquisitely-sensitive nerves have a mortal antipathy to noise? Schopenhauer-whom, pessimist as he is, we shall always respect for his sentiment on this subject - declares that while ordinary men regard noise with stoical indifference, thinkers, and especially men of true genius, find it insupportable. "I have ever been of opinion," he says, "that the amount of noise a man can support with equanimity is in inverse proportion to his mental powers, and may be taken, therefore, as a measure of intellect generally. If I hear a dog barking for hours on the threshold of a house, I know well enough what kind of brains I may expect from its inhabitants. He who habitually slams the door instead of closing it, is not only an ill-bred, but a coarse-grained, feebly-endowed creature."

Eminent THE biographies of many eminent men Haters of confirm the opinion of Schopenhauer. Julius Noise. Cæsar shuddered at the crowing of a cock; the poet Beattie suffered keenly from the same cause; and

the great German philosopher, Kant, abandoned a pleasant house because he could not bear the shrill notes of a neighbor's chanticleer. Wallenstein, though accustomed to the thunder of artillery and the clash of arms, could not endure at home the barking of dogs, nor even the clatter of the large spurs then in fashion. His servants glided about the rooms of his palace at Prague like phantoms, and to keep all noises at a distance, twelve men patrolled round it night and day. The Rev. F. W. Robertson, whose sermons are instinct with the finest genius, could not hear without torture a piano playing in the adjoining house. Heine was so sensitive to noise that even a clock ticking at night rendered him sleepless, and, next day, ill.

What would all these sensitive beings say and do, if they were alive to-day, residing in Boston, and "stretched on the rack of restless ecstasy," as some of us are, by the whistle of locomotives, the ding-dong of the fire-alarm, the daily and nightly rumbling and bell-ringing of electric cars, the wheezing and creaking of asthmatic hand-organs, the preprandial clatter of milk-carts, and all the other ear-torturing and nerve-rasping sounds which engender suicidal thoughts in our Boston Babel? If the Roman lyrist, Horace, with all his poetic gifts, could not meditate or compose his verse in a street where a contractor was hurrying along, puffing and blowing, with his mules and porters, a machine whirling aloft ponderous stones or beams, and funeral processions clashing with unwieldy wagons, — what shall a modern scribbler do, with but a tithe of his genius, amidst noises tenfold more torturing and confusing?

A Spiritual
Enigma.

WHY is it that the children of very intellectual parents, whose fathers and mothers

are both endowed with genius or remarkable ability, are often so dull, or at least mediocre, in ability? No satisfactory explanation has been given of this paradox, which so contradicts our natural expectation. The phenomenon would surprise us less if we would reflect that as matter often acts paradoxically, as when two cold liquids united become boiling hot, or when the mixing of two clear liquids produces an opaque mud, -so spirit may, analogically, play similar pranks.

No!

SAINTE-BEUVE, the celebrated French critic, says of Fénelon, in his admirable causerie on the good bishop, that he lacked that irritability of good sense and of reason which makes one say "No" with vehemence,

that direct, prompt, and somewhat blunt faculty which Boileau carried into literature, and Bossuet into theology. This inability to say "No" with vehemence, or at least unalterably, has been the rock on which thousands of men have been shipwrecked who might otherwise have made life's voyage victoriously. It makes "all the difference in the world" whether one contracts early a habit of uttering with facility and frequency the little monosyllable "Yes," or that yet more diminutive one "No." It may be an unpleasant fact to recognize, but it is none the less true that the contracting of the one habit or the other often determines the question whether one is to be a freeman or a slave; whether he is to be a help or a clog on the world's progress; whether he is to roll through life in a coach-andtwo, or hobble along on crutches.

The well-known conversationist, Richard Sharp, says of some noted man that his audible pronunciation of the two monosyllables "Ay" and "No" made his fortune.