The governor, putting his knife across the plate and throwing his spectacles up on his forehead, replied:
Almost every nature, however sprightly, sometimes will drop into a minor key, or a subdued mood that in common parlance is recognized as "the blues." There may be no adverse causes at work, but somehow the bells of the soul stop ringing, and you feel like sitting quiet, and you strike off fifty per cent from all your worldly and spiritual prospects. The immediate cause may be a northeast wind, or a balky liver, or an enlarged spleen, or pickled oysters at twelve o'clock the night before.
In such depressed state no one can afford to sit for an hour. First of all let him get up and go out of doors. Fresh air, and the faces of cheerful men, and pleasant women, and frolicsome children, will in fifteen minutes kill moping. The first moment your friend strikes the keyboard of your soul it will ring music. A hen might as well try on populous Broadway to hatch out a feathery group as for a man to successfully brood over his ills in lively society. Do not go for relief among those who feel as badly as you do. Let not toothache, and rheumatism, and hypochondria go to see toothache, rheumatism and hypochondria. On one block in Brooklyn live a doctor, an undertaker and a clergyman. That is not the row for a nervous man to walk on, lest he soon need all three. Throw back all the shutters of your soul and let the sunlight of genial faces shine in.
Besides that, why sit ye here with the blues, ye favored sons and daughters of men? Shone upon by such stars, and breathed on by such air, and sung to by so many pleasant sounds, you ought not to be seen moping. Especially if light from the better world strikes its aurora through your night sky, ought you be cheerful. You can afford to have a rough luncheon by the way if it is soon to end amid the banqueters in white. Sailing toward such a blessed port, do not have your flag at half mast. Leave to those who take too much wine "the gloomy raven tapping at the chamber door, on the night's Plutonian shore," and give us the robin red-breast and the chaffinch. Let some one with a strong voice give out the long-metre doxology, and the whole world "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow."
"But do you not suppose, Governor Wiseman, that every man has his irritated days?"
Yes, yes, responded the governor. There are times when everything seems to go wrong. From seven o'clock a.m. till ten p.m. affairs are in a twist. You rise in the morning, and the room is cold, and a button is off, and the breakfast is tough, and the stove smokes, and the pipes burst, and you start down the street nettled from head to foot. All day long things are adverse. Insinuations, petty losses, meanness on the part of customers. The ink bottle upsets and spoils the carpet. Some one gives a wrong turn to the damper, and the gas escapes. An agent comes in determined to insure your life, when it is already insured for more than it is worth, and you are afraid some one will knock you on the head to get the price of your policy; but he sticks to you, showing you pictures of old Time and the hour-glass, and Death's scythe and a skeleton, making it quite certain that you will die before your time unless you take out papers in his company. Besides this, you have a cold in your head, and a grain of dirt in your eye, and you are a walking uneasiness. The day is out of joint, and no surgeon can set it.
The probability is that if you would look at the weather-vane you would find that the wind is northeast, and you might remember that you have lost much sleep lately. It might happen to be that you are out of joint instead of the day. Be careful and not write many letters while you are in that irritated mood. You will pen some things that you will be sorry for afterward.
Let us remember that these spiked nettles of life are part of our discipline. Life would get nauseating if it were all honey. That table would be poorly set that had on it nothing but treacle. We need a little vinegar, mustard, pepper and horse-radish that brings the tears even when we do not feel pathetic. If this world were all smoothness, we would never be ready for emigration to a higher and better. Blustering March and weeping April prepare us for shining May. This world is a poor hitching post. Instead of tying fast on the cold mountains, we had better whip up and hasten on toward the warm inn where our good friends are looking out of the window, watching to see us come up.
Interrupting the governor at this point, we asked him if he did not think that rowing, ball playing and other athletic exercises might be made an antidote to the morbid religion that is sometimes manifest. The governor replied:
No doubt much of the Christian character of the day lacks in swarthiness and power. It is gentle enough, and active enough, and well meaning enough, but is wanting in moral muscle. It can sweetly sing at a prayer meeting, and smile graciously when it is the right time to smile, and makes an excellent nurse to pour out with steady hand a few drops of peppermint for a child that feels disturbances under the waistband, but has no qualification for the robust Christian work that is demanded.