there to please our taste or (like
some virtuous dittany) to heal our bruises, this much is certain, that
the power of enjoyment has to be brought from beyond its limits.

Happiness, dear fellow-gardeners, is not a garden plant.

In plain English: happiness is not the aim of life, although it is
life's furtherance and in the long run life's _sine qua non_. And not
being life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for its
own sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, and
what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical
nor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence;
and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing the
unattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good for
us. Happiness _is_ good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us,
indispensable to us. But ... how put such transcendental facts into
common or garden (for it is _garden_) language? But _we_--that is to
say, poor human beings--are one thing, and life is quite another. And as
life has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently its
own duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quite
natural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what we
happen to ask for--namely, happiness--as a reward for being thoroughly
alive.

Now, for some reason not of our choosing, we cannot be thoroughly alive
except as a result of such exercises as come under the headings: Work
and Duty. That seems to be the law of Life--of Life which does not care
a button about being aesthetic or wisely epicurean. The truth of it is
brought home to us occasionally in one of those fine symbolical
intuitions which are the true stuff of poetry, because they reveal the
organic unity and symmetry of all existence. I am alluding to the sense
of cloying and restlessness which comes to most of us (save when tired
or convalescent) after a very few days or even hours shut up in quite
the finest real gardens; and to that instinct, impelling some of us to
inquire about the lodges and the ways out, the very first thing on
coming down into some private park. Of course they are quite exquisite,
those flowery terraces cut in the green turf, and bowling greens set
with pines or statues, and balustraded steps with jars and vases. And
the great stretches of park land with their solemn furbelowed avenues
and their great cedars stretching _moire_ skirts on