“Ah! that spring should vanish with the rose,
That youth’s sweet scented manuscript should close!”
Time but dissipates each rapturous dream, and the revelation of our ignorance comes with the experience of riper years. Only once are we the proud possessors of all knowledge and all wisdom, and this is in the dreamy days of life’s happy morning. And yet, we never lose our self-conceit as we advance in years; we only adjust our vanity to the knowledge we acquire. We learn how to dodge some of the jagged walls of trouble and to avoid some of the mud holes of calamity; but vanity still lures us on in myriad paths of folly. Its most dangerous form is that which conjures in men the delusion that they know everything, and that they can turn from one field of effort to another without disturbing their equilibrium and gather fruits and flowers with equal success from all alike. This is the snag upon which so many little kites get hung.
As no single honey-bee can rob all the flowers of the land, so no one mind can master all branches of knowledge. Nature has endowed humanity with different aptitudes for different lines of labor. Indeed, she seems to delight in infinite diversity. Ever true to this wonderful impulse of variation she confers on mankind intellectual gifts as multiform as her flowers—flinging them into the hovel as freely as into the palace.
A hard fall on the ice pond of experience.
One individual has the gift of speech, another the gift of thought. One talks without thinking, another thinks without talking. One man sees, hears and notes everything; another sees and hears, but notes nothing. He cannot recall whether he has been alive for the past hour or not; and if his wife asks him what manner of gown Mrs. So-and-so wore last night at the reception, he could not tell for the life of him whether she wore any gown at all. One touches business and it turns to gold; another touches it, and it turns to rags. One touches the button of politics, and the doors of office fly open with a national hymn in their hinges; another presses it, and the doors fly open to his competitor. One youth whispers a magical word into the listening ear of a laughing girl and lo! her little head of auburn curls falls upon his shoulder; another youth whispers the same word to the same girl and lo! his head falls into the sawdust! One fair maiden sings as gloriously as a lark in June skies; another thinks she sings, but doesn’t—she only screams, and her trills are a cross between a fife and a cane-mill as she twists her neck and walls her eyes like a dying swan.
But there is scarcely a human being under the sun who is not blessed with some special gift of mind for the achievement of success in some special field of endeavor.
A good old farmer and his wife had four sons, and they believed that three of them possessed talent which would some day make them great. But when they came to poor John, the youngest of the flock, they agreed that he was a natural born fool. Finally a sudden light beamed in the old man’s face and with melody in his voice he said: “Nancy, I can say one thing for John; he’s the best whistler that ever twisted wind into music—by gum.” Here was nature’s compensation for lack of brains—for John was endowed with a talent which is esteemed, in these modern days, as one of the rarest among men—a talent which might some day make John a sort of Eolian Orpheus whose slightest breath would open to him the door of fame; for have we not recently read in the public prints of a whistling artist in the person of a charming young woman who has taken the music loving world by storm and whistled herself into the choir of a rich and fashionable church?
How the hearts of the young male worshipers must thrill and palpitate when she puckers her pouting lips to join in the sacred anthem. It must be like the nectared melody of the nightingale dripping and tinkling from the heart of a puckered rose.