But why not more than merely that? I used at one time to have frequent
discussions on art and life with a certain poor friend of mine, who
should have found sweetness in both, giving both sweetness in return,
but, alas, did neither. We were sitting in the fields where the
frost-bitten green was just beginning to soften into minute starlike
buds and mosses, and the birds were learning to sing in the leafless
lilac hedgerows, the sunshine, as it does in spring, seeming to hold
the world rather than merely to pour on to it. "You see," said my
friend, "you see, there is a fundamental difference between us. You
are satisfied with what you call _happiness_; but I want _rapture and
excess_."
Alas, a few years later, the chance of happiness had gone. That door
was opened, of which Epictetus wrote that we might always pass through
it; in this case not because "the room was too full of smoke," but,
what is sadder by far, because the room was merely whitewashed and
cleanly swept.
But those words "rapture and excess," spoken in such childlike
simplicity of spirit, have always remained in my mind. Should we not
teach our children, among whom there may be such as that one was, that
the best thing life can give is just that despised thing _happiness_?