ays in the
world, and would very likely have called him back, if tears and
prayers could have done so. They can see now what his prolonged life
amounted to, and how the world has closed up the gap he once filled
while he still lives in it.

A great part of the unhappiness of this world consists in regret for
those who depart, as it seems to us, prematurely. We imagine that if
they would return, the old conditions would be restored. But would
it be so? If they, in any case, came back, would there be any place
for them? The world so quickly readjusts itself after any loss, that
the return of the departed would nearly always throw it, even the
circle most interested, into confusion. Are the Enoch Ardens ever
wanted?

II

A popular notion akin to this, that the world would have any room for
the departed if they should now and then return, is the constant
regret that people will not learn by the experience of others, that
one generation learns little from the preceding, and that youth never
will adopt the experience of age. But if experience went for
anything, we should all come to a standstill; for there is nothing so
discouraging to effort. Disbelief in Ecclesiastes is the mainspring
of action. In that lies the freshness and the interest of life, and
it is the source of every endeavor.

If the boy believed that the accumulation of wealth and the
acquisition of power were what the old man says they are, the world
would very soon be stagnant. If he believed that his chances of
obtaining either were as poor as the majority of men find them to be,
ambition would die within him. It is because he rejects the
experience of those who have preceded him, that the world is kept in
the topsy-turvy condition which we all rejoice in, and which we call
progress.

And yet I confess I have a soft place in my heart for that rare
character in our New England life who is content with the world as he
finds it, and who does not attempt to appropriate any more of it to
himself than he absolutely needs from day to day. He knows from the
beginning that the world could get on without him, and he has never
had any anxiety to leave any result behind him, any legacy for the
world to quarrel over.

He is really an exotic in our New England climate and society, and
his life is perpetually misunderstood by his neighbors, because he
shares none of their uneasiness about getting on in life. He is even
called lazy, good-for-nothing, and "shi