Middle age in chasing time,
Old age, alas, in killing time.
Reared in a soil of generous sufficiency, nourished by wisdom and kindness in the warm sunshine of love, instead of the human plant being blighted when the winds blew and the rains fell, it grew stronger and blossomed and bore the fruit of work.
“Oh, poor So-and-so was not brought up to work,” people often say despondingly when bad times overtake their friends; “theirs was such a happy home.” But surely the home should be happy. At least, let there be something of gladness to look back on, when one is struggling uphill under a heavy load. The influence of parents is incalculable in effect on children. The example of my father was powerful in helping me to take up my burden as he had done his.
If these pages, put together after thirteen years of constant work, seem too scrappy—disconnected even—let me ask the sympathy of those who know what it is to be interrupted again and again by illness in the midst of a task. Illness that has laid me on my sofa, in bed, even sent me to a “cure” in search of health, as often as six times in eighteen months; that makes the grasshopper a burden.
Without friendship and sympathy courage would have failed to go on struggling with what seemed a veritable burden, and yet when well, how little I thought of toil and stress when writing more important books. The offer of a friend to undertake a little of the drudgery of the task seemed to lift tons’ weight off my head. Still, though other hands may pull a sofa and shake pillows into place, the invalid’s direction is needful or her own room would not have her own individuality, and would lose the personal touch that gives the clue.
Ups and downs will come. Bolts will fall from the blue. The unexpected is what always happens.
Then, oh, why not be prudent, both young men and maidens? Don’t be foolish, shy, or negligent to make provision against a possible wintry time, by settlement, or insurance, and in every sound and legal way hedge round your home against those desolating intruders—Poverty or Illness.
I do not intend to enter into all my ancestral chain between these covers; and I do not mean to moralise. People don’t care a ha’penny for other people’s philosophy, although everybody must have some kind of working philosophy of his own after he has knocked about in the crowd and scrimmage of life. I’ve got mine, like other folk, and I’ve learnt there are only two things worth living for—love and friendship. The first is not passion, but the capacity to care for the welfare of others more than for one’s own. Passion burns itself out, love is ceaselessly unselfish.
And friendship? Why, friendship is the handmaiden of sympathy, the art of appreciation, the pleasant interchange of thought.