no time save the conscious moment called "now," it is quite possible to
make that "now" a happy state of existence. The point I make is that we
should not habitually postpone that season of happiness to the future.

No one, I trust, wishes to cloud the dreams of youth, or to dispel by
excess of light what are called the illusions of hope. But why should the
boy be nurtured in the current notion that he is to be really happy only
when he has finished school, when he has got a business or profession by
which money can be made, when he has come to manhood? The girl also
dreams that for her happiness lies ahead, in that springtime when she is
crossing the line of womanhood,--all the poets make much of this,--when
she is married and learns the supreme lesson how to rule by obeying. It
is only when the girl and the boy look back upon the years of adolescence
that they realize how happy they might have been then if they had only
known they were happy, and did not need to go in pursuit of happiness.

The pitiful part of this inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness
is, however, that most men interpret it to mean the pursuit of wealth,
and strive for that always, postponing being happy until they get a
fortune, and if they are lucky in that, find at the end that the
happiness has somehow eluded them, that; in short, they have not
cultivated that in themselves that alone can bring happiness. More than
that, they have lost the power of the enjoyment of the essential
pleasures of life. I think that the woman in the Scriptures who out of
her poverty put her mite into the contribution-box got more happiness out
of that driblet of generosity and self-sacrifice than some men in our day
have experienced in founding a university.

And how fares it with the intellectual man? To be a selfish miner of
learning, for self-gratification only, is no nobler in reality than to be