be ever stored in our soul.  It is well, at first, to know happiness as men conceive it, so that, later, we may have good reason for preferring the happiness of our choice.  For, herein, it is not unlike what we are told of love.  To know what real love should be we must have loved profoundly, and that first love must have fled.  It is well to know moments of material happiness, since they teach us where to look for loftier joys; and all that we gain, perhaps, from listening to the hours that babble aloud in their wantonness is that we are slowly learning the language of the hours whose voice is hushed.  And of these there are many; they come in battalions, so close on the heels of each other that treachery and flight cannot be; wherefore it is on them alone that the sage should depend.  For he will be happy whose eyes have learned to detect the hidden smile and mysterious jewels of the myriad, nameless hours; and where are these jewels to be found, if not in ourselves?

90.  But there is a kind of ignoble discretion that has least in common, of all things, with the wisdom we speak of here; for we had far better spend our energy round even fruitless happiness, than slumber by the fireside awaiting joys that never may come.  Only the joys that have been offered to all, and none have accepted, will knock at his door who refuses himself to stir forth.  Nor is the other man wise who holds the reins too tight on his feelings, and halts them when reason commands, or experience whispers.  The friend is not wise who will not confide in his friend, remembering always that friendships may come to an end; nor the lover, who draws back for fear lest he may find shipwreck in love.  For here, were we twenty times unfortunate, it is still only the perishable portion of our energy for happiness that suffers; and what is wisdom after all but this same energy for happiness cleansed of all that is impure?  To be wise we must first learn to be happy, that we may attach ever smaller importance to what happiness may be in itself.  We should be as happy as possible, and our happiness should last as long as is possible; for those who can finally issue forth from self by the portal of happiness, know infinitely wider freedom than those who pass through the gate of sadness.  The joy of the sage illumines his heart and his soul alike, whereas sadness most often throws light on the heart alone.  One might almost compare the man who had never been happy with a traveller whose every journey had been taken by night.  Moreover, there is in happiness a humility deeper and nobler, purer and wider, than sorrow can ever procure.  There is a certain humility that ranks with parasitic virtues, such as sterile self-sacrifice, arbitrary chastity, blind submission, fanatic renouncement, penitence, false shame, and many others, which have from time immemorial turned aside from their course the waters of human morality, and forced them into a stagnant pool, around which our memory still lingers.