There is no doubt some selfish satisfaction in yielding to melancholy, and fancying that we are victims of fate; in brooding over grievances, especially if more or less imaginary. To be bright and cheerful often requires an effort; there is a certain art in keeping ourselves happy: and in this respect, as in others, we require to watch over and manage ourselves, almost as if we were somebody else.

Sorrow and joy, indeed, are strangely interwoven. Too often

"We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." As a nation we are prone to melancholy. It has been said of our countrymen that they take even their pleasures sadly. But this, if it be true at all, will, I hope, prove a transitory characteristic. "Merry England" was the old saying; let us hope it may become true again. We must look

to the East for real melancholy. What can be sadder than the lines with which Omar Khayyam opens his quatrains :1

"We sojourn here for one short day or two,
And all the gain we get is grief and woe;
And then, leaving life's problems all unsolved
And harassed by regrets, we have to go;"

or the Devas' song to Prince Siddartha, in Edwin Arnold's beautiful version:

"We are the voices of the wandering wind,
Which moan for rest, and rest can never find.
Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life—

A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife."

If indeed this be true, if mortal life be so sad and full of suffering, no wonder that Nirvana-the cessation of sorrowshould be welcomed even at the sacrifice of consciousness.

But ought we not to place before ourselves a very different ideal-a healthier, manlier, and nobler hope?

Life is not to live merely, but to live well. There are some "who live without any design at all, and only pass in the

1 I quote from Whinfield's translation.

world like straws on a river: they do not go; they are carried,"1-but as Homer makes Ulysses say, "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rest unburnished; not to shine in use as though to breathe were life!"

Goethe tells us that at thirty he resolved "to work out life no longer by halves, but in all its beauty and totality."

"Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen
Resolut zu leben."

It

Life indeed must be measured by thought and action, not by time. certainly may be, and ought to be, bright, interesting, and happy; for, according to the Italian proverb, "if all cannot live on the Piazza, every one may feel the sun."

If we do our best; if we do not magnify trifling troubles; if we look resolutely, I do not say at the bright side of things, but at things as they really are; if we avail ourselves of the manifold blessings which surround us; we cannot but feel that life is indeed a glorious inheritance.

1 Seneca

"More servants wait on man

Than he'll take notice of. In every path

He treads down that which doth befriend him When sickness makes him pale and wan. Oh mighty Love! Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him."1

Few of us, however, realise the wonderful privilege of living, or the blessings we inherit; the glories and beauties of the Universe, which is our own if we choose to have it so; the extent to which we can make ourselves what we wish to be; or the power we possess of securing peace, of triumphing over pain and sorrow. Dante pointed to the neglect of opportunities as a serious fault :

"Man can do violence

To himself and his own blessings, and for this
He, in the second round, must aye depiore,
With unavailing penitence, his crime.
Whoe'er deprives himself of life and light
In reckless lavishment his talent wastes,
And sorrows then when he should dwell in joy."

Ruskin has expressed this with special allusion to the marvellous beauty of this

1 Herbert

glorious world, too often taken as a matter of course, and remembered, if at all, almost without gratitude. "Holy men," he complains, "in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on His giving of bread, and raiment, and health (which He gives to all inferior creatures) they require us not to thank Him for that glory of His works which He has permitted us alone to perceive: they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even: they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight:" and yet, as he justly says elsewhere, "each of us, as we travel the way of life, has the choice, according to our working, of turning all the voices of Nature into one song of rejoicing; or of withering and quenching her sympathy into a fearful withdrawn