We want to go ahead, but of what is behind us we have had our fill. What is the feeling we have when we meet a crowd pressing into the show as we are coming out, or when we see our eager friends embarking for Europe as we again set foot on our native shore ? Do we not have a kind of pity for them? Do we not feel that we have taken the cream and that they will find only the skimmed milk? We think of the world as moving on, everybody and everything as pressing forward. To live our lives over again would be to go far to the rear. It would be to give up the present and all that it holds; it would be a kind of death.

Take from life all novelty, newness, surprise, hope, expectation, and what have you left? Nothing but a cold pancake, which even the dog hesitates over. One's life is full of routine and repetition, but then it is always a new day; it is always the latest time; we are on the crest of the foremost wave; we are perpetually entering a new and untried land. I am told that lecturers do not weary of repeating the same lecture over and over, because they always have a new audience. The routine of our lives is endurable because, as it were, we always have a new audience; this day is the last birth of time and its face no man has before seen. Life becomes stale to us when we cease to feel any interest in the new day, when the night does not re-create us, when we are not in some measure born afresh each morning. As age comes on we become less and less capable of renewal by rest and sleep, and so gradually life loses

its relish, till it is liable to become a positive weari

ness.

Hence in saying we would not live our lives over, we are only emphasizing this reluctance we feel at going back, at taking up again what we have finished and laid down. Time translates itself in the mind as space; our earlier lives seem afar off, to be reached only by retracing our steps, and this we are not willing to do. In the only sense in which we can live our lives over, namely, in the lives of our children, we live them over again very gladly. We begin the game again with the old zest.

Who would not have his youth renewed? What old man would not have again, if he could, the vigor and elasticity of his prime? But we would not go back for them; we would have them here and now, and date the new lease from this moment.

It argues no distaste for life, therefore, no deep dissatisfaction with it, to say we would not live our lives over again. We do live them over again from day to day, and from year to year; but the shadow of the past, we would not enter that. Why is it a shadow? Why this pathos of the days that are gone? Is it because, as Schopenhauer insists, life has more pain than pleasure? But it is all beautiful, the painful experiences as well as the pleasurable ones; it is all bathed in a light that never was on sea or land, and yet we see it as it were through a mist of tears. There is no pathos in the future, or in the present; but in the house of memory there are more sighs than laughter.

AB

XVIII

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS

BOUT the pursuit of happiness, how often I say to myself, that considering life as a whole, the most one ought to expect is a kind of negative happiness, a neutral state, the absence of acute or positive unhappiness. Neutral tints make up the great background of nature, and why not of life? Neutral tints wear best in anything. We do not tire of them. How much even in the best books is of a negative or neutral character, a background upon which the positive beauty is projected. A kind of tranquil, wholesome indifference, with now and then a dash of positive joy, is the best of the common lot. To be consciously and positively happy all the while, how vain to expect it! We cannot walk through life on mountain peaks. Both laughter and tears we know, but a safe remove from both is the average felicity.

Another thought which often occurs to me is that we each have a certain capacity for happiness or unhappiness which is pretty constant. We are like lakes or ponds which have their level, and which as a rule are not permanently raised or lowered. As things go in this world, each of us has about all the

happiness he has the capacity for. We cannot be permanently set up or cast down. A healthful nature, in the vicissitudes of experience, is not made permanently unhappy, nor, on the other hand, is its water level permanently raised. Deplete us and we fill up; flood us and we quickly run down. We think that if a certain event were to come to pass, if some rare good fortune should befall us, our stock of happiness would be permanently increased, but the chances are that it would not; after a time we should settle back to the old everyday level. We should get used to the new conditions, the new prosperity, and find life wearing essentially the same tints as before. Our pond is fed from hidden springs ; happiness is from within, and outward circumstances have but little power over it. The poor man thinks how happy he would be with the possessions of his rich neighbor, but it is one of the commonplace sayings of the preacher that he would not be. Wealth would not change his nature. His wants, his longings, would still run on as before. It would be high water with him for a season, but it could not last.

I have been told that, as a rule, the millionaires are the unhappiest of men. Restless, suspicious, sated, ennuied, they are like a sick man who can find no position in which he can rest. Our real and necessary wants are so few and so easily met,

food, clothes, shelter! If a little money will bring us such comfort, what will not riches do? So we multiply our possessions many fold, hoping thereby to multiply our happiness. But it does not

work, or works inversely. Do you suppose the millionaire's little girl has any more pleasure with her hundred-dollar doll than your washerwoman's child has with her rag baby? And what would not the millionaire himself give if he could eat his rich dinner with the relish the day laborer has in eating his!

The great depressor and destroyer of happiness is death; but from this blow, too, a healthful nature recovers. The broken and crushed plant rises again. The scar remains, but in the tissue beneath runs the same old blood.

It is undoubtedly true, however, that as time wears on, life becomes of a soberer hue. We are young but once, and need not wish to be young more than once. There is the happiness of youth, there is the happiness of manhood, there is the happiness of old age,

each period wearing a hue peculiar to itself. One of the illusions of life, however, which it is hard to shake off, is the fancying we were happier in the past than we are in the present. The past has such power to hallow and heighten effects! In the distance the course we have traveled looks smooth and inviting. The present moment is always the lowest point in the circle; it is that part of the wheel which touches the ground. Those days in the past that so haunt our memory and that seem invested with a charm and a significance that is unknown to the present, how shall we teach ourselves that it is all a trick of the imagination, the result of the medium through which they are seen, and that they, too, were once the present, and were as prosy and commonplace as the moment that now is?