"an amateur at life," and wit and wisdom are married in the jest. A
man who lives only for himself has not begun to live--has yet to
learn his use, and his real pleasure, too, in the world. It is not
necessary he should marry to find himself out, but it is necessary
he should love. Men have come to themselves serving their mothers
with an unselfish devotion, or their sisters, or a cause for whose
sake they forsook ease and left off thinking of themselves. If is
unselfish action, growing slowly into the high habit of devotion,
and at last, it may be, into a sort of consecration, that teaches a
man the wide meaning of his life, and makes of him a steady
professional in living, if the motive be not necessity, but love.
Necessity may make a mere drudge of a man, and no mere drudge ever
made a professional of himself; that demands a higher spirit and a
finer incentive than his.


III

Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best
that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest
achievement he is fit for. It is only then that he knows of what he
is capable and what his heart demands. And, assuredly, no
thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and
a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not
know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and
for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect,
and made him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems to
him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood.
And so men grow by having responsibility laid upon them, the burden
of other people's business. Their powers are put out at interest,