say, in their despairing determination to have, if need be, a last “good time” and die.  Their efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the “romantic” outbursts of aging people.  For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender sympathy.  I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the dining-car of life—­and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed.  Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call.  From various causes, they have mismanaged their lives.  They have probably lived in a numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad manners to eat one’s cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private; and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather doesn’t get.

A wholesome oblivion of one’s neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.  Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one’s privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development.  Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call.  Nothing in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the hypocrisies of society.  For those who have never lived, and are now fain to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a ghastly irony.  But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as they came along, with Catullus singing their vivamus atque amemus, and practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain.  We are apt sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to, it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on.  And it won’t be the days when we didn’t that we shall recall with a sense of possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically did.  Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland!  Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the city!

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean?  But these thou
shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the
nymphs in the brake.

It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living.  The stalks of the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower.  It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret.  The temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our middle age.  I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest dying man would tell you.  And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by “E.  Nesbit” which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet’s volume, it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who need its lesson.  I quote it, too, from memory, so I trust that the length of time I have remembered it may be set to my credit against any verbal mistakes I make.