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Bohemian Society by Lydia Leavitt
page 18 of 51 (35%)
and in dreams kneel again at a mother's knee repeating the prayer she
taught and which has long since been forgotten, to awake with regret to
the cares which riches bring.

There is one more journey which the rich and the poor take together and
that is down and through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

It is a curious study to watch the faces one meets in a large city or
town. Every face has a history, every life a story, if we but take the
trouble to read. The face is but an index of the heart, and even in the
heart of the happiest the "muffled drums are beating."

As Longfellow so beautifully expresses it in "Hyperion" "and then mark!
how amid the chorus of a hundred voices and a hundred instruments--of
flutes and drums, and trumpets--this unreal shout and whirlwind of the
vexed air, you can so clearly distinguish the melancholy vibration of a
single string touched by the finger--a mournful sobbing sound. Ah this
is indeed human life! where in the rushing noisy crowd, and sounds of
gladness, and a thousand mingling emotions, distinctly audible to the
ear of thought, are the pulsations of some melancholy string of the
heart, touched by an invisible hand."

An Optimist, a pleasant, sweet faced woman, with a voice like the chime
of silver bells, is saying:

"It is only to morbid and diseased minds that existence looks colorless.
People who live too much within themselves, whose imagination becomes
disordered see only the dark side of life. It was not intended that life
should be all sunshine and no shadow."

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