A happy half-century, and other essays

by Agnes Repplier

A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
AND OTHER ESSAYS

A
HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY
AGNES REPPLIER, Litt. D.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1908

COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September 1908

TO
J. WILLIAM WHITE

PREFACE

The half-century, whose more familiar aspects this little book is designed to illustrate, has spread its boundary lines. Nothing is so hard to deal with as a period. Nothing is so unmanageable as a date. People will be born a few years too early; they will live a few years too long. Events will happen out of time. The closely linked decades refuse to be separated, and my half-century, that I thought so compact, widened imperceptibly while I wrote.