Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/118

 flushes over long, purple waters, and of lying on sand beaches wrapped in sunshine, all the problems of human intercourse soothed away in a naked and unquestioning content. What he said was very little, but watching in his eyes I could guess what had happened. He had found more than sunshine and color and an arc of violet sea. He had found a new philosophy, a new strength and realization of the worthiness of life. He had traveled far to find it: it might just as well be learned in Independence Square any sunny day when the golden light falls upon springing grass.

It is strange that men should have to be reminded of these things! How patiently, how persistently, with what dogged and misdirected pluck, they have taught themselves to ignore the elemental blessings of mankind, subsisting instead on pale and wizened and ingenious substitutes. It is like a man who should shoulder for a place at a quick lunch counter when a broad and leisurely banquet table was spread free just around the corner. The days tick by, as busy, as fleeting, as full of empty gestures as a moving picture film. We crowd old age upon ourselves and run out to embrace it, for age is not measured by number of days but by the exhaustion of each day. Twenty days lived at slow pulse, in harmony with earth's loveliness, are longer than two hundred crowded with feverish appointments and disappointments. Many a man has lived fifty or sixty hectic years and never yet learned the unreckonable