No, we are all glad to have come this way once.  It is the thought of a second journey over the same ground that chills us and gives us pause.  Sometimes you will hear men answer, “Yes, if I could have the experience I have had in this life.”  By which they mean, “Yes, if I could come back with the certainty of making all the short cuts to happiness that I now see I have missed.”  But that is to vulgarise the question.  It is to ask that life shall not be a splendid mystery, every day of which is

            an arch wherethrough
    Gleams the untravelled world;

but that it shall be a thoroughly safe three per cent. investment into which I can put my money with the certainty of having a good time—­all sunshine and no shadows.  But life on those terms would be the dreariest funeral march of the marionettes.  Take away the uncertainty of life, and you take away all its magic.  It would be like going to the wicket with the certainty of making as many runs as you liked.  No one would trouble to go to the wicket on those preposterous terms.  It is because I may be out first ball or stay in and make a hundred runs (not that I ever did any such heroic thing) that I put on the pads with the feverish sense of adventure.  And it is because every dawn breaks as full of wonder as the first day of creation that life preserves the enchantment of a tale that is never told.

Moreover, how would experience help us?  It is character which is destiny.  If you came back with that weak chin and flickering eye, not all the experience of all the ages would save you from futility.

No, if life is to be lived here again it must be lived on the same unknown terms in order to be worth living.  We must come, as we came before, like wanderers out of eternity for the brief adventure of time.  And, in spite of all the fascinations of that adventure, the balance of our feeling is against repeating it.  For we know that every thing that makes life dear to us would have vanished with all the old familiar faces and happy associations of our former pilgrimage, and there is something disloyal in the mere thought of coming again to form new attachments and traverse new ways.  Holmes once wrote a poem about being “Homesick in heaven”; but it would be still harder to be homesick on earth—­to be wandering about among the ghosts of old memories, and trying to recapture the familiar atmosphere of things.  We should make new friends; but they would not be the same.  They might be better; but we should not ask for better friends:  we should yearn for the old ones.

There is a fine passage in Guido Rey’s noble book on the “Matterhorn” which comes to my mind as a fitting expression of what I think we feel.  He was on his way to climb the mountain, when, on one of its lower slopes, he saw standing lonely in the evening light the figure of a grey-headed man.  It was Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn—­Whymper grown old, standing there in the evening light and