soon
as we sunk into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met were similarly
disenchanted. And here is one reason of a dozen why the world is dull to
dull persons.

*****

All literature, from Job and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt
Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such
largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of
living to the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about the best
satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a
show, or made out of the same stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its more
rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages; and after a myriad bald
heads have wagged over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped
one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy
has the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her contribution
towards the subject: that life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation.
Truly a fine result! A man may very well love beef, or hunting, or a
woman; but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation!
He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a
club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly of abstract death.
We may trick with the word life in its dozen senses until we are weary
of tricking; we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but
one fact remains true throughout--that we do not love life in the sense
that we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not,
properly speaking, love life at all, but living.

*****

Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall--a mere bag's
end, as the French say--or whether we think of it as a vestibule or
gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some
more noble destiny; whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little
atheistic poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look
justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a
bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of these views
and situations there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should
stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set
before him with a single mind.

As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good
man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise
our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not
at all abashe