He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be led astray by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore, not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow. Rather he will consider the problem of life akin to a problem of Euclid, the quod erat demonstrandum of which is reached only in the last line. He will guard the fires of youth, that he may not in age have to sit by the cold ashes of exhausted pleasures.
Sad indeed is the fate of those men who live to outlive themselves. You find them in every community, and especially in those classes of society which offer the greatest opportunities for early liberty and enjoyment. They suffer from a kind of premature senility. They have fallen in the struggle, though they are not visibly wounded. To them, life has lost its zest and action its aim. Usually this is the result of the early exhaustion of irrational enjoyments; but it may proceed from some blow of disappointed ambition, from a violent shock to the emotions, from the vertigo of unlooked-for prosperity, or the discouragement of persistent adversity. The stroke has fallen, and no voice can awake them to action again.
The continuing satisfaction of an intense love of living,—that would be a fairly good definition of happiness, and not far from one which Fichte proposed.
Few at any age could say with Fontenelle at ninety-three,—“Had I my life to live again, I should change nothing.”
What nobler compliment could be paid a man than this, which Vittoria Colonna wrote to Michael Angelo,—“You have disposed the labor of your whole life as one single great work of art.”