Already our own thoughts
and words have an alien sound. There is a simultaneous diminution of
memory and hope. Projects that once we laughed and leaped to
execute, find us, now sleepy and preparing to lie down in the snow.
And in the serene hours we have no courage to spare. We cannot
afford to let go any advantages. The riches of body or of mind which
we do not need today, are the reserved fund against the calamity that
may arrive tomorrow. It is usually agreed that some nations have a
more sombre temperament, and one would say that history gave no
record of any society in which despondency came so readily to heart
as we see it and feel it in ours. Melancholy cleaves to the English
mind in both hemispheres as closely as to the strings of an Aeolian
harp. Men and women at thirty years, and even earlier, have lost all
spring and vivacity, and if they fail in their first enterprizes,
they throw up the game. But whether we, and those who are next to
us, are more or less vulnerable, no theory of life can have any
right, which leaves out of account the values of vice, pain, disease,
poverty, insecurity, disunion, fear, and death.
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