All have read of the proud Egyptian king who ordered a colossal staircase built in his new palace, and was chagrined to find that he required a ladder to climb from one step to the next. A king's legs are as short as those of a beggar. So, too, a prince's ability to enjoy the pleasures of life is no greater than that of a pauper.
"All that is valuable in this world is to be had for nothing. Genius, beauty, health, piety, love, are not bought and sold. The richest man on earth would vainly offer a fortune to be qualified to write a verse like Milton, or to compose a melody like Mozart. You may summon all the physicians, but they cannot procure for you the sweet, healthful sleep which the tired laborer gets without price. Let no man, then, call himself a proprietor. He owns but the breath as it traverses his lips and the idea as it flits across his mind; and of that breath he may be deprived by the sting of a bee, and that idea, perhaps, truly belongs to another."
"We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths:
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best;
And he whose heart beats quickest lives the longest."
CHAPTER XXII.
MORAL SUNSHINE.
I have gout, asthma, and seven other maladies, but am otherwise very well. —Sidney Smith.
The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius. —Whipple.
This one sits shivering in fortune's smile,
Taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath;
This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while
Laughs in the teeth of death.
—T. B. Aldrich.
There is no real life but cheerful life. —Addison.