hich I can put my money with the certainty of having a good time--all
sunshine and no shadows. But life on those terms would be the dreariest
funeral march of the marionettes. Take away the uncertainty of life, and
you take away all its magic. It would be like going to the wicket with the
certainty of making as many runs as you liked. No one would trouble to go
to the wicket on those preposterous terms. It is because I may be out first
ball or stay in and make a hundred runs (not that I ever did any such
heroic thing) that I put on the pads with the feverish sense of adventure.
And it is because every dawn breaks as full of wonder as the first day of
creation that life preserves the enchantment of a tale that is never told.

Moreover, how would experience help us? It is character which is destiny.
If you came back with that weak chin and flickering eye, not all the
experience of all the ages would save you from futility.

No, if life is to be lived here again it must be lived on the same unknown
terms in order to be worth living. We must come, as we came before, like
wanderers out of eternity for the brief adventure of time. And, in spite of
all the fascinations of that adventure, the balance of our feeling is
against repeating it. For we know that every thing that makes life dear to
us would have vanished with all the old familiar faces and happy
associations of our former pilgrimage, and there is something disloyal in
the mere thought of coming again to form new attachments and traverse new
ways. Holmes once wrote a poem about being "Homesick in heaven"; but it
would be still harder to be homesick on earth--to be wandering about among
the ghosts of old memories, and trying to recapture the familiar atmosphere
of things. We should make new friends; but they would not be the same. They
might be better; but we should not ask for better friends: we should yearn
for the old ones.

There is a fine passage in Guido Rey's noble book on the "Matterhorn" which
comes to my mind as a fitting expression of what I think we feel. He was on
his way to climb the mountain, when, on one of its lower slopes, he saw
standing lonely in the evening light the figure of a grey-headed man. It
was Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn--Whymper grown old, standing
there in the evening light and gazing on the mighty rock that he had
vanquished in his prime. His climbing days were done, and he sought no more
victories on the mountains. He had h