de chose est la vie humaine_, is an exclamation in the mouths of
moralists and philosophers, to which I cannot agree. It is little, it
is short, it is not worth having, if we take the last hour, and leave
out all that has gone before, which has been one way of looking at the
subject. Such calculators seem to say that life is nothing when it is
over, and that may in their sense be true. If the old rule--_Respice
finem_--were to be made absolute, and no one could be pronounced
fortunate till the day of his death, there are few among us whose
existence would, upon those conditions, be much to be envied. But this
is not a fair view of the case. A man's life is his whole life, not the
last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable,
and not a _little matter_, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains.
To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary from our own superannuated
desires or forgetful indifference is about as reasonable as to say, a
man never was young because he has grown old, or never lived because he
is now dead. The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend
on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged
of from the last stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor
last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two--not our
exit nor our entrance upon the stage, but what we do, feel, and think
while there--that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it.
Indeed it would be easy to show that it is the very extent of human
life, the infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory
and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another,
the hours, months, years spent in one fond pursuit after another; that
it is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of
events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual
perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in
its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing!
It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough to