It is no use holding up an ideal
which cannot be attained, and which the mere attempt to attain is
fruitful in disaster and discontent.
I do not at all wish to teach a gospel of dulness. I am of the
opinion of the poet who said:
"Life is not life at all without delight,
Nor hath it any might."
But I am quite sure that the real pleasures of the world are those
which cannot be bought for money, and which are wholly independent
of success.
Every one who has watched children knows the extraordinary amount
of pleasure that they can extract out of the simplest materials. To
keep a shop in the corner of a garden, where the commodities are
pebbles and thistle-heads stored in old tin pots, and which are
paid for in daisies, will be an engrossing occupation to healthy
children for a long summer afternoon. There is no reason why that
kind of zest should not be imported into later life; and, as a
matter of fact, people who practise self-restraint, who are
temperate and quiet, do retain a gracious kind of contentment in
all that they do or say, or think, to extreme old age; it is the
jaded weariness of overstrained lives that needs the stimulus of
excitement to carry them along from hour to hour.
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