ed: is there not something brave and spirited in
such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace,
foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an
end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those
whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort
of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the
man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much
as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the
highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The
noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are
hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.

VI

EL DORADO

It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are
so many marriages and decisive battles, and where we all, at certain
hours of the day, and with great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of
victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And
it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as
possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet, as regards
the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when
we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and although we
dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring
beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are
inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the
term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of
how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a
joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which
we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of
pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.
Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some
interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science,
the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where
they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires
and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patienc