the thing which we find beautiful in other
souls, the art, the poetry, the tradition, the love of nature, the
craft, the interests we hanker after. It need not contain all these
things, because we can often do better by checking diffuseness, and by
resolute self-limitation. It is not by believing in particular books,
pictures, tunes, tastes, that we can do it. That ends often as a mere
prison to the thought; it is rather by meeting the larger spirit that
lies behind life, recognising the impulse which meets us in a thousand
forms, which forces us not to be content with narrow and petty things,
but emerges as the energy, whatever it is, that pushes through the
crust of life, as the flower pushes through the mould. Our dulness,
our acquiescence in monotonous ways, arise from our not realising how
infinitely important that force is, how much it has done for man, how
barren life is without it. Here in England many of us have a dark
suspicion of all that is joyful, inherited perhaps from our Puritan
ancestry, a fear of yielding ourselves to its influence, a terror of
being grimly repaid for indulgence, an old superstitious dread of
somehow incurring the wrath of God, if we aim at happiness at all. We
must know, many of us, that strange shadow which falls upon us when we
say, "I feel so happy to-day that some evil must be going to befal
me!" It is true that afflictions must come, but they are not to spoil
our joy; they are rather to refine it and strengthen it. And those who
have yielded themselves to joy are often best equipped to get the best
out of sorrow.

We must aim then at fulness of life; not at husbanding our resources
with meagre economy, but at spending generously and fearlessly,
grasping experience firmly, nurturing zest and hope. The frame of mind
we must be beware of, which is but a stingy vanity, is that which
makes us say, "I am sure I should not like that person, that book,
that place!" It is that closing-in of our own possibilities that we
must avoid.

There is a verse in the Book of Proverbs that often comes into my
mind; it is spoken of a reprobate, whose delights indeed are not those
that the soul should pursue; but the temper in which he is made to
cling to the pleasure which he mistakes for joy, is the temper, I am
sure, in which one should approach life. He cries, "_They have
stricken me, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it
not. When shall I awake? I will seek it yet again._"