270 AN ODD LIFE.
I see myself rejecting the best gifts and the highest duties of To-Day for the illusory felicities and the far-away virtues of the Day~After-To-Morrow. I see myself passing by Love with the reflection that I should be passing again ; putting off Purity with the thought that I should be round that way presently ; and waving to Duty an amicable salute of ' Ex- pect me soon.' And in this moment of clear vision I see not only my past, I realise what my future would be if I lived. I see the influx of fresh feeling gradually exhausted, overcome, ousted, and finally replaced by a satiety more horrible than that of the septuagenarian, as I came to realise that life for me held no surprises, no lures to curiosity, that the future was no enchanted realm of mysterious possibil- ities, that the white clouds revealed no seraph shapes on the horizon, that Hope did not stand like a veiled bride with beckoning finger, that fairies were not lurking round every corner nor magic palaces waiting to start up at every turn. I see life stretching before me like old ground I had been over — in my mother's image like a street one side of which I had walked down. What could the other offer of fresh, of delightful? It is so rarely one side differs from the other: a church for a public-house, a grocer's instead of a book- shop. Conceive the horror of foreknowledge : of having no sensations to learn and few new emotions to feel ; to have, moreover, the enthusiasm of youth sicklied over with the prescience of senile cynicism, and the healthy vigour of manhood made flaccid by anticipations of the dodderings of age ! I foresee the ever-growing dismay at the leaps and bounds with which my youth was fleeting. I see my- self, instead of profiting by my experience, feverishly clutch- ing at every pleasure on my path, as a drowning man, borne along by a torrent, snatches at every scrap of flotsam and jetsam. I see manhood arrive only to pass away, as an
