that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o'er every action
of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after.

Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic
pathos. Superficial--or, if you prefer it, more normal--observers are
made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all
abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient
feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The
playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the
world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With
what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But
perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most
tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the
trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find
herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled.

Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish
heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious
material--were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a
single summer day--it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered
somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and
disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the
winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it
seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the
vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them
with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to
life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such
fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and
clean of heart--yet "what hath man of all his labours, and of the
vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun." Yea,