its without being vexed by the slightest inconvenience?
You will discover that one of the acutest enjoyments of the mortal
state will be found to consist in guarding against suffering. If
you are provided with balloons attached to all your members, you
float upon the sea with indifference. It is the certainty that you
will drown if you do not swim which gives zest to the exercise. I
climb along yonder jutting cornice of the cliff with eagerness,
and pluck my simples with a hand that trembles more from joy than
fear, precisely because the strain of balancing the nerves, and
the certainty of suffering as the result of carelessness, knit
my sensations together into an exaltation which is not exactly
pleasure, perhaps, but which is not to be distinguished from it
in its exciting properties.

PALLAS.

Is life, then, to resolve itself for us into a chain of
exhilarating pangs?

AESCULAPIUS.

Life will now be for you, for all of us, a perpetual combat with a
brine that half supports, half drags us under; a continual creeping
and balancing on a chamois path around the forehead of a precipice.
A headache will be the breaking of a twig, a fever a stone that
gives way beneath your foot, to lose the use of an organ will be
to let the alpenstock slip out of your starting fingers. And the
excitement, and be sure the happiness, of existence will be to
protract the struggle as long as possible, to push as far as you
can along the dwindling path, to keep the supports and the
alleviations of your labour about you as skilfully as you can,
and in the fuss and business of the little momentary episodes of
climbing to forget as long and as fully as may be the final and
absolutely unavoidable plunge. [_A pause, during which_ EUTERPE
_sinks upon the green sward_.]

AESCULAPIUS.

I have unfolded before you a scheme of philosophical activity. Are
you not gratified?

PALLAS.

Euterpe will learn to be gratified, Aesculapius, but she had not
reflected upon the plunge. If she will take my counsel, she will
continue to avoid doing so. [EUTERPE _rises, and approaches_
PALLAS, _who continues, to_ AESCULAPIUS.] I am with you in
recommending to her a constant consideration of the momentary
episodes of health. And now let us detain you no longer from the
marchanteas.

EUTERPE.

But pray recollect that they grow where the rocks are both slippery
and shelving.

[_Exit_ AESCULAPIUS. EUTERPE _sinks again upon the grass, with her