Page:The Wild Goose.djvu/45

4.



To men so unhappily placed as we are undergoing a long monotonous voyage, with the full consciousness of being shut out from Life, in the ordinary acceptation of the term,—nothing is more natural that we should calmly try to look within this, now to us, abstract thing; nothing more natural than that we should try to analyse it, and it necessarily follows that to do this we must also look within ourselves—the best of all studies. What is life? However difficult it may seem of definition,, we believe we may simply define it as the pursuit of pleasure or happiness—for in this instance, both may be regarded as synonymous terms; and whether we regard it in connection with an individual main or with men in general, the definition will hold good. If we look within our own individual lives in the first instance, and next within life in its more extended sense, we shall find it to be nothing more or less than an endless pursuit of happiness.—or quite the same thing, the means of attaining it. From the cradle to the grave we are ever pursuing this phantom, never obtaining it; for "man never is, but always to be, blessed." Happiness the of life that leads us o’er hill and dale, through brake and briar; still alluring us on, sometimes by paths that lead through pleasant places, sometimes through ways strewn with thorns. The paths followed by men in their pursuit after happiness are as numerous and as different as the men themselves; and often a man trips many different ones in the span of his short life. This pursuit is carried on by two great highways—the intellectual, and the material, or animal, from which branch off the thousand different by-paths by which individual men diverge in the pursuit. men place their hopes of its attainment in, amongst other things, Riches, Power, the Ideal, Science, Art, Philanthropy, Ambition, Avarice, and sensual indulgence of the more animal propensities, and some even causing misery to others, according to their different idiosyncrasies, and they attain a comparative success according as their path is selected from the highways of Intellectuality or Materialism,—the former affording a purer and more axalted pleasure to those who pursue it; that afforded by the latter being on a par with that of the brute creation; whilst of the demoniacal pleasure sought after by some in causing the misery of others,—we know not what to say. It is a melancholy trait in human nature that men are formed who try to build up their own happiness by pulling down something that is the happiness of another—often his reputation.