Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1887 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

El Dorado 173
years, we are so constituted that our hopes
are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of
hoping is prolonged until the term of life.
To be truly happy is a question of how we
begin and not of how we end, of what we
want and not of what we have. An aspira-
tion is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as
a landed estate, a fortune which we can never
exhaust and which gives us year by year a
revenue of pleasurable activity. To have
many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life
is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre
unless we have some interests in the piece ;
and to those who have neither art nor science,
the world is a mere arrangement of colours,
or a rough footway where they may very
well break their shins. It is in virtue of
his own desires and curiosities that any man
continues to exist with even patience, that
he is charmed by the look of things and
people, and that he wakens every morning
with a renewed appetite for work and plea-
sure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes
through which he sees the world in the most