Cheerfulness as a Life Power

Book Excerpt: ies they live to enjoy life; here they exist for business.＂ A Boston merchant corroborated this statement by saying he was anxious all day about making money, and worried all night for fear he should lose what he had made.＂In the United States,＂ a distinguished traveler once said, ＂there is everywhere comfort, but no joy. The ambition of getting more and fretting over what is lost absorb life.＂＂Every man we meet looks as if he’d gone out to borrow trouble, with plenty of it on hand,＂ said a French lady, upon arriving in New York.＂The Americans are the best-fed, the best-clad, and the best-housed people in the world,＂ says another witness, ＂but they are the most anxious; they hug possible calamity to their breasts.＂＂I question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on the faces of any other population,＂ says Emerson; ＂old age begins in the nursery.＂How quickly we Americans exhaust life! With what panting haste we pursue everything! Every man you meet seems tRead More