smiles of beauty, by the poison concealed in polished flatteries, by the
deceitfulness hidden, beneath the warmest praises, by the demons of
envy, jealousy, and pride which take from success itself its
promised joys.

Who is happy with any amount of wealth? Who is free from corroding
cares? Who can escape anxiety and fear? How hard to shake off the
burdens which even a rich man is compelled to bear? There is a fly in
every ointment, a skeleton in every closet, solitude in the midst of
crowds, isolation in the joy of festivals. The wrecks of happiness are
strewn in every path that the world has envied.

Read the lives of illustrious men; how melancholy often are the latter
days of those who have climbed the highest! Caesar is stabbed when he
has conquered the world. Diocletian retires in disgust from the
government of an empire. Godfrey languishes in grief when he has taken
Jerusalem. Charles V. shuts himself up in a convent. Galileo, whose
spirit has roamed the heavens, is a prisoner of the Inquisition.
Napoleon masters a continent, and expires on a rock in the ocean.
Mirabeau dies of despair when he has kindled the torch of revolution.
The poetic soul of Burns passes away in poverty and moral eclipse.
Madness overtakes the cool satirist Swift, and mental degeneracy is the
final condition of the fertile-minded Scott. The high-souled Hamilton
perishes in a petty quarrel, and curses overwhelm Webster in the halls
of his early triumphs. What a confirmation of the experience of Solomon!
"Vanity of vanities" write on all walls, in all the chambers of
pleasure, in all the palaces of pride!

This is the burden of the preaching of Solomon; but it is also the
lesson which is taught by all the records of the past, and all the