the great, brave, glittering world.

What I desired was that, in the height of our jubilant self-gratulation,
some sweet and gracious figure, full of heavenly wisdom, could have
twitched the gaudy curtain aside for a moment and shown us other things
than these; who could have assured us that we all, however stupid and
dreary and awkward and indolent, however vexed with low dreams and ugly
temptations, yet had our share and place in the rich inheritance of
life; and that even if it was to be all a record of dull failure,
commonplace sinfulness cheered by no joyful triumph, no friendly
smile--yet if we fought the fault and did the dull task faithfully,
and desired to be but a little better, a little stronger, a little more
unselfish, that the pilgrimage with all its sandy tracts and terrifying
spectres would not be traversed in vain; and then I think we might have
been brought together with a sense of sweeter and truer unity, and might
have thought of life as a thing to be shared, and joy as a thing to be
lavished, and not have rather conceived of the world as a place full
of fine things, of which we were all to gather sedulously as many as we
could grasp and retain.

Or even if the good Bishop had taken a simpler line and told the boys
some old story, like the story of Polycrates of Samos, I should have
been more comfortable. Polycrates was the tyrant with whom everything
went well that he set his hand to, so that to avoid the punishment of
undue prosperity he threw his great signet-ring into the sea; but when
he was served a day or two later with a slice of fish at his banquet,
there was the ring sticking in its ribs. The Bishop might have said that
this should teach us not to try and seize all the good things we could,
and that the reason of it was not, as the old Greeks thought, that the
gods envied the prosperity of mortals, but that our prosperity was often
dashed very wisely and tenderly from our lips, because one of the worst
foes that a man can have, one of the most blinding and bewildering of
faults, is the sense of self-sufficiency and security. That would not
have spoilt the pleasure of those brisk boys, but would have given them
something wholesome to take away and think about, like the prophet's
roll that was sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly.

It may be thought that I have thus dilated on the Bishop's address for
the sole purpose of showing what a much better address I could have
made. That is n