Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

VI
EL DORADO
It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world
where there are so many marriages and decisive
battles, and where we all, at certain hours of the
day, and with great gusto and despatch, stow a
portion of victuals finally and irretrievably into the
bag which contains us. And it would seem also,
on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as
possible was the ojQie goal of man's contentious life.
And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance.
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily,
one thing leading to another in an endless series.
There is always a new horizon for onward-looking
men, and although we dwell on a small planet,
immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond
a brief period of 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 aspiration is a joy for ever, a pos-
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