dumb evermore,
And again we shall lie side by side, you and I,
Beneath the green cover you helped to lay over
Our honest old father of yore.

* * * * *

A HALF-LIFE AND HALF A LIFE.

"On garde longtemps son premier amant, quand on n'en prend point de
second."

_Maximes Morales du Duc de la Rochefoucauld._.

It is not suffering alone that wears out our lives. We sometimes are in
a state when a sharp pang would be hailed almost as a blessing,--when,
rather than bear any longer this living death of calm stagnation, we
would gladly rush into action, into suffering, to feel again the warmth
of life restored to our blood, to feel it at least coursing through our
veins with something like a living swiftness.

This death-in-life comes sometimes to the most earnest men, to those
whose life is fullest of energy and excitement It is the reaction, the
weariness which they name Ennui,--foul fiend that eats fastest into the
heart's core, that shakes with surest hand the sands of life, that makes
the deepest wrinkles on the cheeks and deadens most surely the lustre of
the eyes.

But what are the occasional visits of this life-consumer, this vampire
that sucks out the blood, to his constant, never-failing presence? There
are those who feel within themselves the power of living fullest lives,
of sounding every chord of the full diapason of passion and feeling, yet
who have been so hemmed around, so shut in by adverse and narrowing
circumstances, that never, no, not once in their half-century of years
which stretch from childhood to old age, have they been free to breathe
out, to speak aloud the heart that was in them. Ever the same wasting
indifference to the things that are, the same ill-repressed longing for
the things that might be. Long days of wearisome repetition of duties in
which there is no life, followed by restless nights, when Imagination
seizes the reins in her own hands, and paints the out-blossoming of
those germs of happiness and fulness of being of whose existence within
us we carry about always the aching consciousness.

And such things I have known from the moment when I first stepped from
babyhood into childhood, from the time when life ceased to be a play and
came to have its duties and its sufferings. Always the haunting sense of
a happiness which I was capable of feeling, faint glimpses of a paradise
of which I was a born denizen,--and always, too, the ste