| The Joy of Service |
Chapter 3 |
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It is always so; our own heart makes our world for us, and fills and peoples it, and the music we hear is modulated as it passes over the chords of our own soul. If you hold a smooth sea shell to your ear, you hear a strange, murmuring sound, which we used to be told in childhood was a sort of reminiscence of the ocean’s roar. The fancy is that the shell, having lain long amid the waves, the music of the sea has hidden in its magic chambers, and that this is what you hear when you hold the shell to your ear.
This pretty fancy is dispelled, however, when you learn that, instead of the music of the ocean, the sound you hear is caused by the beating of your own heart, the throbbing of the blood in your fingers. Lay the shell on a table, and put your ear to it, and there is no music; you hear the murmur only when you hold the shell in your hands.
Many of the sounds which we hear, attributing them to various sources, are but the noise of our own pulses; and every sound that breaks upon our ear is modified at least by the mood or quality of our own inner life. When our heart is glad, the world is full of song. When our heart is sad, the world is full of tears.
“In ourselves the sunshine dwells;
In ourselves the music swell;
Everywhere the heart awake
Finds what pleasure it can make;
Everywhere the light and shade
By the gazer’s eye is made.”
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