"What! smile perpetually?" says the realist. "How silly!"
Yes, smile perpetually! Go to Delsarte here, and learn even from the mechanician of smiles that a smile can be indicated by a movement of muscles so slight that neither instruments nor terms exist to measure or state it; in fact, that the subtlest smile is little more than an added brightness to the eye and a tremulousness of the mouth. One second of time is more than long enough for it; but eternity does not outlast it.
In that wonderfully wise and tender and poetic book, the "Layman's Breviary," Leopold Schefer says,--
"A smile suffices to smile death away;
And love defends thee e'en from wrath divine!
Then let what may befall thee,--still smile on!
And howe'er Death may rob thee,--still smile on!
Love never has to meet a bitter thing;
A paradise blooms around him who smiles."
Death-Bed Repentance.
Not long since, a Congregationalist clergyman, who had been for forty-one years in the ministry, said in my hearing, "I have never, in all my experience as a pastor, known of a single instance in which a repentance on what was supposed to be a death-bed proved to be of any value whatever after the person recovered."
This was strong language. I involuntarily exclaimed, "Have you known many such cases?"
"More than I dare to remember."
"And as many more, perhaps, where the person died."
"Yes, fully as many more."