The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1871-12-07
A Plea for CheerfuIne.s.

Inc really most cheerful lecture of the Mer
camille Library Course was given last evening
by James I. Fields, Esq, of Boston. Mr..
Fields is as charming speaker as writer, and
sends out with quiet gesture sparkling fun,
genuine humor, and pungent sarcasm; taking
up his audience with him and imbuing them
with his own genial spirit 1t was grand,
beautiful and finished Plea for Cheerfulness
that he gave his auditors-one that warmed the
hearts of his hearers with good humor and the
very pth of cheerfulness. He said that at this
festal season, when the joy of Christmas and
the New Year were close at hand, it was his
mission to speak in behalf of cheerfulness, one
! of the fine arts, and almost one of the lost
arts. He once asked sculptor to mold
figure of cheerfulness, and he asked in
reply, Where shall 1 find a subject? Not
among Americans, for they are a people en-
crossed in business and the solid matters of
life, and were monuments of gloom; yet he
would find among them an outgoing of cheer
fulness Business, no matter how pressing or
severe, should never multiply gloomy faces
We can laugh while we trade; and then he
wove in a very pretty figure about the old adj
age that Laughing is catching" and on this
cheer upon the hearts of his hearers In this
connection he said he would rather be the au-
thor of story that was full of laughter than of
anything that could be written outside the vale
OF. oheerfulness Yet there were some people,
he believed, who had no faculty for cheerful
ness, who were dependent entirely upon lau-
danum or other stimulants for all their good
humor. They were to be pitied. With others
all wit and jollity was Glow" Pity would do
that class of people no good. And here the
pages OF his manuscript were filled with anec-
dotes illustrative of the cheerful side of life.
And then he went on to show in a pleasant
manner that to be born with cheerful temper
ament was to be blessed with priceless posses
sion, and yet there were parents who would
crush it in their children, and others who are
ever ready to cast a shadow over such treas
ure. And here he spoke in eloquent terms for
cheerfulness for children. Too much could not
be done to make them cheerful and happy
Going off into the field of literature he said
that there was too much gloom in our poetry
and altogether too much melancholy, while
such writer's as Holmes, Bret Harte and
Miller were perfect God-sends. Mournful
reading was painful, dull and unprofita-
BILE, while cheerfulness, whether intro
duced into literature, trade or religion, was
economy. 1t would make philosophy, theology
and poetry all the better. He would also have
it introduced into the family and thus do away
with the demand for quack medicines, and then
as pretty figure in his remarks he said that
there was cheerfulness in the flower, and he
was glad to see so many in the button holes of
the people. There might be, he said, tadpoles
and pollywogs in a drop of water when seen
under microscope; if so, then don't look at a
drop of water under microscope. And here
he introduced Characteristic pictures of gloom
that we see every day, closing his cheerful and |
lecture with eloquent reference to
such men as Walter Scott and Washington Irv-
ing and Charles Dickens, whose writings clear
ed the very air whenever they were read, and
sent ray of cheerfulness into the prison cell as |
well as the home circle.