be generously and sincerely grateful for having been allowed to taste, through the medium of personal consciousness, the marvellous experience of the beauty and interest of life, its emotions, its relationships, its infinite yearnings, even though the curtain may descend upon his own consciousness of it, and he himself may become as though he had never been, his vitality blended afresh in the vitality of the world, just as the body of his life, so near to him, so seemingly his own, will undoubtedly be fused and blent afresh in the sum of matter.  A man, even though racked with pain and tortured with anxiety, may deliberately and resolutely throw himself into sympathy with the mighty will of God, and cherish this noble and awe-inspiring thought—­the thought of the onward march of humanity; righting wrongs, amending errors, fighting patiently against pain and evil, until perhaps, far-off and incredibly remote, our successors and descendants, linked indeed with us in body and soul alike, may enjoy that peace and tranquillity, that harmony of soul, which we ourselves can only momentarily and transitorily obtain.

XVII

JOY

Dr. Arnold somewhere says that the schoolmaster’s experience of being continually in the presence of the hard mechanical high spirits of boyhood is an essentially depressing thing.  It seemed to him depressing, just because that happiness was so purely incidental to youth and health, and did not proceed from any sense of principle, any reserve of emotion, any self-restraint, any activity of sympathy.  I confess that in my own experience as a schoolmaster the particular phenomenon was sometimes a depressing thing and sometimes a relief.  It was depressing when one was overshadowed by a fretful anxiety or a real sorrow, because no appeal to it seemed possible:  it had a heartless quality.  But again it was a relief when it distracted one from the pressure of a troubled thought, as when, in the Idylls of the King, the sorrowful queen was comforted by the little maiden “who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness, which often lured her from herself.”

One felt that one had no right to let the sense of anxiety overshadow the natural cheerfulness of boyhood, and then one made the effort to detach oneself from one’s preoccupations, with the result that they presently weighed less heavily upon the heart.

The blessing would be if one could find in experience a quality of joy which should be independent of natural high spirits altogether, a cheerful tranquillity of outlook, which should become almost instinctive through practice, a mood which one could at all events evoke in such a way as to serve as a shield and screen to one’s own private troubles, or which at least would prevent one from allowing the shadow of our discontent from falling over others.  But it must be to a certain extent temperamental.  Just as high animal spirits in some people are irrepressible,