greater nobler nature. Choose only the best. Read some of the
best in religion, in science, in the useful and liberal arts, in phit
osophy, in literature, and as a result you will reap the fruit's of
a well-rounded manhood.
For evidence of the universality of pain we need only look at
the world about us ; or we may find it in the history or the litera 7
ture of any age or any clime ; it is bedded in the rocky crust of the
earth, and breathes through every language of the world. List
the words of pain that rise at once in thought—pain, agony, tor
ture, terror, distress, torment, suffering, sorrow, affliction, woe,
bereavement, want, anguish, death, grief, remorse„ despair mourn
ing, famine, pestilence, desolation, misery, persecution, disease.
Stop; the lexicon of pain is too long. But all this marshaled host of
mournful terms has place in our dictionaries, and the words are
in our language, because the experience of mankind has needed
them to express the facts of life. And yet, all this affluence of
verbal store, how insufficient it is any soul can testify that has
sounded
.the awful deeps of human experience. Nay, it is even
insufficient for literature, let alone life. The great writers who
move us most strongly by the portrayal of pain do it, not by these
words, but by presenting a situation and conditions wherefrom
we, working by our experience, conceive of pain what language
does not hold and cannot utter.
An intelligence unacquainted with our earthly life, but capable
of apprehending fully the significance of this woe-filled vocabulary,
would certainly conceive this world to be—
"An abyssnial valley dolorous,
That gathers thunder of infinite undulations,
Resounding through dark airs without a star."
He would not believe that ripples of laughter, sounds, of mirth
and songs of gladness move its airs, that triumphant, paeans of
praise and lbfty hallelujahs make earth vibrant with music that
PAIN