tiness,
All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
All beauty, and all starry majesties,
And dim transtellar things;--even that it may,
Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
Confess--"It is enough."

Yes, it is enough. We accept the verdict of mortality uncomplainingly--nay,
we would not wish it to be reversed, even if that were possible.

Now this question must not be confounded with that other, rather foolish,
question, "Is Life worth living?" The group round the smoking-room fire
would have answered that question--if they had troubled to answer it at
all--with an instant and scornful "Yes." They had all found life a great
and splendid adventure; they had made good and wholesome use of it; they
would not surrender a moment of its term or a fragment of its many-coloured
experience. And that is the case with all healthy-minded people. We may,
like Job, in moments of depression curse the day when we were born; but the
curse dies on our lips. Swift, it is true, kept his birthday as a day of
mourning; but no man who hates humanity can hope to find life endurable,
for the measure of our sympathies is the measure of our joy in living.

Even those who take the most hopeless view of life are careful to keep out
of mischief. A friend of mine told me recently of a day he had spent with a
writer famous for the sombre philosophy of his books. In the morning the
writer declared that no day ever passed in which he did not wish that he
had never been born; in the afternoon he had a most excellent opportunity
of being drowned through some trouble with a sailing boat, and he rejected
the chance with almost pathetic eagerness. Yet I daresay he went on
believing that he wished he had never been born. It is not only the
children who live in the world of "Let us make pretend."

No, we are all glad to have come this way once. It is the thought of a
second journey over the same ground that chills us and gives us pause.
Sometimes you will hear men answer, "Yes, if I could have the experience I
have had in this life." By which they mean, "Yes, if I could come back with
the certainty of making all the short cuts to happiness that I now see I
have missed." But that is to vulgarise the question. It is to ask that life
shall not be a splendid mystery, every day of which is

an arch wherethrough
Gleams the untravelled world;

but that it shall be a thoroughly safe three per cent. investment into
w