The Optimist  (English, Paperback, Goss Charles Frederic)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. A DILAPIDATED old coach, having met -- with an accident, had been sent to the carriage-maker's for repairs. It stood on the sidewalk in front of a shop on the Reading road. In the box was seated a bareheaded boy, stretching his hands out as if grasping a pair of lines. On the patched cushions inside were three little girls, holding their dollies in their arms, and gazing at them or out of the windows, in a sort of rapture. Although the wagon tongue lay idle on the ground, the little coachman could see four splendid horses galloping before him, and could feel the pull of the reins on his chubby palms. Although the broken wheel was in the shop, and its tire lying red upon the anvil, it seemed to the little ladies that they were rolling over a magnificent boulevard in a primeval forest, and through a bewildering labyrinth of flowers, while birds sang from the trees and fountains plashed in marble basins. The jaded roues, the miserable victims of ennui, the surfeited pleasure-seekers who passed now and then, might well have stopped to learn the secret of human happiness. Could these little philosophers have spoken, they would have said: '' Happiness in childhood springs out of a spontaneous, and in manhood out of an educated, imagination. The world is what it seems, not what it is. Life is rather what the soul reads into it than what it stamps upon the soul. See us! Here is a battered old coach standing on a plank sidewalk, in front of a weather beaten old carriage shop, beside a dusty road. It is rickety, a wheel is off, there are no horses, and yet every thing seems- new and beautiful to us. Surely such old people as you are, who know so much more than we little children, ought to be able to drape the rough and ragged edges of life with beauty, and permeate...