gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children,
_Bescheerung_. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly
believe, nothing but a long act of courtship, then, surely, its
exquisite things--summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny
winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented
hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of
the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear--all these, and
all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt
with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts.

A present, then, may be defined as a _thing which one wants given by a
person whom one likes_. But our English syntax falls short of my
meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fashion, "a
by a person one likes to one given object one wants." The stress of the
sentence should be laid on the word _wants_. For much of the charm, and
most of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being _a thing one would
otherwise have done without_.

This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feel
hot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presents
because, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have been
forthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided that
gifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, or
cooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the wares
of silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all hands
that, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should like
to add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would be
the better, nine times out of ten, for being presents.

'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative
scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come
by our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free to
waste, provided we do not steal. Now, _my manuals of political economy_
(which were, of course, _not_ presents to me) make it quite plain that
whatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from the
profitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, which
require no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habit
of indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fills
our houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber