this and a great deal more. This, however, is but one side of the
picture. If life has its own natural gladness which is expressed by
spring, it has also its own natural sadness which is expressed by
winter; and the worth of life, if this is all we trust to, will be as
various and as changing as the weather is. But this is not all. Even
this worth, such as it is, depends for us at present, in a large
measure, upon religion--not directly indeed, but indirectly. This life
of air, and nerve, and muscle, this buoyant consciousness of joyous and
abounding health, which seems so little to have connection with faiths
or theories, is for us impregnated with a life that is impregnated with
these, and thus their subtle influence pervades it everywhere. There is
no impulse from without which stirs or excites the senses, that does not
either bring to us, or send us on to, a something beyond itself. In each
of these pleasures that seems to us so simple, floats a swarm of hopes
and memories, like the gnats in a summer twilight. There is not a sight,
a sound, a smell, not a breath from sea or garden, that is not full of
them, and on which, busy and numberless, they are not wafted into us.
And each of these volatile presences brings the notions of right and
wrong with it; and it is these that make sensuous life tingle with so
strange and so elaborate an excitement. Indirectly then, though not
directly, the mere joy in the act of living will suffer from the loss of
religion, in the same manner, though perhaps not in the same degree, as
the other joys will. It will not lose its existence, but it will lose
zest. The fabric of its pleasures will of course remain what it ever
was; but its brightest inhabitants will have left it. It will be as
desolate as Mayfair in September, or as a deserted college during a long
vacation.

We may here pause in passing, to remark on the shallowness of that
philosophy of culture, to be met with in certain quarters, which, whilst