en a new currency, that a good, once attained, loses all its
value. The instability of our attention, the need of rest and repair in
our organs, makes a round of objects necessary to our minds; but
we turn from a beautiful thing, as from a truth or a friend, only to
return incessantly, and with increasing appreciation. Nor do we
lose all the benefit of our achievements in the intervals between
our vivid realizations of what we have gained. The tone of the
mind is permanently raised; and we live with that general sense of
steadfastness and resource which is perhaps the kernel of
happiness. Knowledge, affection, religion, and beauty are not less
constant influences in a man's life because his consciousness of
them is intermittent. Even when absent, they fill the chambers of
the mind with a kind of fragrance. They have a continual efficacy,
as well as a perennial worth.

There are, indeed, other objects of desire that if attained leave
nothing but restlessness and dissatisfaction behind them. These are
the objects pursued by fools. That such objects ever attract us is a
proof of the disorganization of our nature, which drives us in
contrary directions and is at war with itself. If we had attained
anything like steadiness of thought or fixity of character, if we
knew ourselves, we should know also our inalienable satisfactions.
To say that all goods become worthless in possession is either a
piece of superficial satire that intentionally denies the normal in
order to make the abnormal seem more shocking, or else it is a
confession of frivolity, a confession that, as an idiot never learns to
distinguish reality amid the phantasms of his brain, so we have
never learned to distinguish true goods amid our extravagances of
whim and passion. That true goods exist is nevertheless a fact of
moral experience. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"; a great
affection, a clear thought, a profound and well-tried faith, are
eternal possessions. And this is not merely a fact, to be asserted
upon the authority of those who know it by experience. It is a
psychological necessity. While we retain the same senses, we must
get the same impressions from the same objects; while we keep our
instincts and passions, we must pursue the same goods; while we
hare the same powers of imagination, we must experience the same
delight in their exercise. Age brings about, of course, variation in
all these particulars, and the susceptibility of two individua