eality, to make
eternally sure of it, somehow to wrest possession of it and the
transfiguring moment for ever, all the time pierced with the melancholy
knowledge that tomorrow all will be as if this had never been, and life
once more its dull disenchanted self?

Too soon shall morning take the stars away,
And all the world be up and open-eyed,
This magic night be turned to common day--
Under the willows on the riverside.

Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the
ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.
If one enchanted moment runs to an end, it may be reasonably sure for a
long time yet of many more enchanted moments to come. It has as yet only
taken a bite or two into the wonderful cake. And, though its poets may
warn it that "youth's a stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously
believe it. Others may have come to an end of their cake, but its cake
is going to last for ever. Alas, for the day when it is borne in upon us
with a tragic suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that he has
been robbed of his hoard, that unaccountably the best part of the cake
has been eaten, that perhaps indeed only a few desperate crumbs remain.
A bleak laughter blends now with that once luxurious melancholy. There
is a song at our window, terribly like the mockery of Mephistopheles.
Our blood runs cold. We listen in sudden fear. It is life singing out
its last call.

The time of this call, the occasion and the manner of it, mercifully
vary with individuals. Some fortunate ones, indeed, never hear it till
they lie on their deathbeds. Such have either been gifted with such a
generous-sized cake of youth that it has lasted all their lives, or
they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add
here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way
you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough,
it is often seen that those who all their lives have eaten their cake
most eagerly have quite a little of it left at the end. There are no
hard and fast rules for the eating of your cake. One can only find out
by eating it; and, as I have said, it may be your luck to disprove the
proverb and both eat your cake and have it.

For a dreary majority, however, the cake does come to an end, and for
them henceforth, as Stevenson grimly put it, the road lies long and
straight and dusty to the g