your old home town

One has to spend

so many years in learning how

to be happy. I am just beginning to make

some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove

Young’s theory that “as soon as we have found the key of life

it opens the gates of death.” Every year strips us of at least one vain

expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its

stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are

our happiest. What a miserable augury for the

progress of the race and the destination

of the individual if the more matured

and enlightened state is the

less happy one!

Childhood is only

the beautiful and happy time

in contemplation and retrospect:

to the child it is full of deep sorrows,

the meaning of which is unknown. Witness

colic and whooping-cough and dread of ghosts,

to say nothing of hell and Satan, and an offended Deity

in the sky, who was angry when I wanted too much plumcake.

Then the sorrows of older persons, which children see but

cannot understand, are worse than all. All this to prove

that we are happier than when we were seven years

old, and that we shall be happier when we are

forty than we are now, which I call a

comfortable doctrine, and one

worth trying to

believe!

George Eliot