ing Sir Richard Steel's "Ugly Club"-that famous fraternity which was founded upon the principle that no one should be admitted to membership, “without a visible queerity in his aspect, or a peculiar cast of countenance, or some personal eccentricity set forth in a table entitled 'The Act of Deformity.'" Such an institution would be of great use in bringing the world to understand the many and admirable advantages of being ugly.

THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF SORROW.

SORRO

ORROW is incommunicable. There is something ineffably sorrowful in the thought. The simple fact that we are in sorrow is, of course, easy of communication, but the personal import of that fact is not to be told. No man can make another understand the nature, character, and extent of the sorrow by which he is himself desolated. That is what I mean by the incommunicability of sorrow. You may be grieved to the soul to learn that your friend is in affliction. You may be ready to go through fire and water, so to speak, to rescue him, but as for comprehending the quality of his grief, fathoming its depths, or measuring its poignancy, you might as well undertake to count the stars. Nor is he in any better case towards you. He can no more enter into your tribulation than you into his. Each may see but too plainly that the other suffers, each may sympathize most cordially with the other, but neither can appreciate at the true value of its anguish the grief that wrings the

other's heart. An old French proverb puts the question. in the clearest possible light,-"Si vous voulez pleurer mes malheurs, prenez mes yeux : ""If you would weep my sorrows, you must take my eyes." Just so. It will not do for you to put yourself in my place. You must discard your own identity and assume mine. To enter into my feelings, you must take upon you my being. Nothing short of an interchange of natures can qualify you to understand my sorrows, or me to understand yours; and any such interchange being impossible, our sorrows are incommunicable. "The heart knoweth his own bitterness," wrote Solomon, the son of David; and what man or woman is there whose own experience does not bear witness to the truth of the assertion? "One can never be the judge of another's grief," says Châteaubriand, "for that which is a sorrow to one, to another is joy. Let us not dispute with any one concerning the reality of his suffering; it is with sorrows as with countries,-each man has his own."

Sorrow is of general prevalence, but of particular operation. Every man's griefs are so interwoven with his personal history as to have become part of himself. He and they may not be sundered. Take, for example, the supremest of all sorrows, that which we endure in the loss of those we love. Let me put the cruel hypothesis that you have lost a child. Your friend to whom you impart the fact may have passed through the same ordeal. He, too, may have wept over the grave of a son or of a daughter. His heart bleeds for you, because of your common calamity, yet is he unable to understand the special force and peculiar poignancy of your bereavement. That is known to you, and to you alone of all the world. The very name of your Beloved strikes

chords of feeling to him unknown, evokes memories to which he is a stranger, elicits associations which to him are mysteries. A trick of feature, a tone of the voice, a resemblance in manner, a song, which your Loved one delighted to sing, a place which he or she was wont to visit, the merest trifle of every-day life, will recall vanished scenes to you alone intelligible, and awaken in your heart emotions which no other heart than yours can share or comprehend. "You are as fond of grief as of your child," says King Philip to Queen Constance, bewailing her pretty Arthur. How eloquent is the reply of the broken-hearted mother!—

"Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.
Fare you well!"

And so it is with all kinds of sorrow. They appeal to reminiscences with which we alone are familiar; they have darkened prospects which we alone delighted to contemplate; they have killed hopes which we alone cherished; they have cast shadows upon a path which we alone must traverse. Therefore is our sorrow incommunicable: "Si vous voulez pleurer mes malheurs, prenez mes yeux."

In her charming little book, the Life of Isaac Hopper, Maria Childs makes some reflections which will come home to all who have ever suffered. "Who does not know that all the sternest conflicts of life can never be recorded? Every human soul must walk alone through the darkest and most dangerous paths of its pilgrimage

-absolutely alone with God. Much from which we suffer most acutely could never be revealed to others; still more could never be understood, if it were revealed ; and still more ought never to be repeated, if it could be understood." Somewhat similar in sentiment are the meditations of a thoughtful German writer, whose words may be translated thus:- "It is not that which is apparent, not that which may be known and told, which makes up the bitterest portion of human suffering, which plants the deepest furrow on the brow and sprinkles the hair with its earliest grey! They are the griefs which lie fathom-deep in the soul, and never pass the lip; those which devour the heart in secret, and which send their victim into public with the wild laugh and troubled eye; those which spring from crushed affections and annihilated hopes; from remembrance, and remorse, and despair; from the misconduct or neglect of those we love; from changes in others; from changes in ourselves." Nor is it alone the guilty, haunted by the visions of their misdeeds, like Orestes by the Furies, or Richard by the Phantoms, who have cause for dejection. An incommunicable sorrow may have been generated by folly or obduracy as surely as by sin. The man who has found out too late that he married the wrong woman ; • the woman who has made the like discovery in the case of a man; the men and women who have missed their paths in life, or lost their chances, or abused their privileges, or, to use a homely phrase, "played their cards badly,"-all these people have occasions of distress beyond the ken of the outer world. So true is it, that "our acts our angels are, or good or ill, our fatal shadows that walk by us still." And the saddest thought of all is, that the most trivial circumstances will suffice to awaken the most tragical reminiscences:

"For ever and anon of griefs subdued,

There comes a token like a scorpion's sting,
Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued,
And slight withal may be the things which bring
Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside for ever: it may be a sound-

A tone of music-summer's eve-or spring

A flower-the wind-the ocean-which shall wound,
Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly

bound."

Then, again, there is the man who, though he works hard and does his best, can never give satisfaction to those whom he loves and in whose cause he toils. Who shall fathom the sorrow of such a wretch? Who shall express his sense of humiliation?

How tender, how melodious, how full of melancholy eloquence are these familiar lines!

"I have a silent sorrow here,

Which never will depart;

It heaves no sigh, it sheds no tear,
But-it consumes my heart."

All forms of tribulation incidental to humanity, whether caused by the death of those whose life is essential to our happiness, or by illness, or by the loss of fortune, or by the darkening of fair fame, or by the overflow of cherished projects, or by whatsoever other malign influence, bring with them a certain incommunicable anguish which is, in fact, the cross that every man and woman is appointed to carry, and which can be laid down only at the grave. In the estrangement of old friends there lurks a sorrow which, being incapable of impartment, is past all surgery. A friend for whom you would willingly lay down your life may not have