e Rebellion Of '45 was the
great event of the world for him, and of that he knew nothing.

I intend no disrespect to this man,--a cheerful and pleasant enough
old person,--but he had evidently lived himself out of the world, as
completely as people usually die out of it. His only remaining value
was to the moralist, who might perchance make something out of him.
I suppose if he had died young, he would have been regretted, and his
friends would have lamented that he did not fill out his days in the
world, and would very likely have called him back, if tears and prayers
could have done so. They can see now what his prolonged life amounted
to, and how the world has closed up the gap he once filled while he
still lives in it.

A great part of the unhappiness of this world consists in regret for
those who depart, as it seems to us, prematurely. We imagine that if
they would return, the old conditions would be restored. But would it be
so? If they, in any case, came back, would there be any place for them?
The world so quickly readjusts itself after any loss, that the return
of the departed would nearly always throw it, even the circle most
interested, into confusion. Are the Enoch Ardens ever wanted?

II

A popular notion akin to this, that the world would have any room for
the departed if they should now and then return, is the constant
regret that people will not learn by the experience of others, that one
generation learns little from the preceding, and that youth never will
adopt the experience of age. But if experience went for anything, we
should all come to a standstill; for there is nothing so discouraging to
effort. Disbelief in Ecclesiastes is the mainspring of action. In that
lies the freshness and the interest of life, and it is the source of
every endeavor.

If the boy believed that the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition
of power were what the old man says they are, the world would very soon
be stagnant. If he believed that his chances of obtaining either were as
poor as the majority of men find them to be, ambition would die within
him. It is because he rejects the experience of those who have preceded
him, that the world is kept in the topsy-turvy condition which we all
rejoice in, and which we call progress.

And yet I confess I have a soft place in my heart for that rare
character in our New England life who is content with the world as he
finds it, and who does not attempt to appropr