m we have had our fill
of. There are objections to every course of life and action, and the
practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence of
objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not craze
yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not
intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed
people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates
peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, "Children,
eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour,--that is
happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an
approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate
well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a man of native
force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill
of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a
mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either.
To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the
road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not
the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians if you will,
to say that the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring
whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting
high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five
minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next
millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat
the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they
are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft
and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the
only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour. Without any shadow
of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself
ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and
wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with,
accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or
odious as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated
its whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, their
contentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying
echo to the heart than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of
admirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful man may suffe