“If, on some balmy summer night,
          You rowed across the moon path white,
          And saw the shining sea grow fair
          With silver scales and golden hair,
          What would you do?”

                        “I would be wise
          And shut my ears and shut my eyes,
          Lest I should leap into the tide
          And clasp the seamaid as I died.”

          “But if you thus were strong to flee
          From sweet spells woven of moon and sea,
          Are you quite sure that you would reach,
          Without one backward look, the beach?”

          “I might look back, my dear, and then
          Row straight into the snare again,
          Or, if I safely got away—­
          Regret it to my dying day.”

He who liveth his life shall live it.  It is a grave error to give ourselves grudgingly to our experiences.  Only in a whole-hearted surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky.  An ever-ready romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the ennui of the years.  Adventures, as the proverb says, are to the adventurous, and, as the old song goes: 

He either fears his fate too much
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.

And the spirit of the times is happily growing more clement toward a greater fulness and variety of life.  The world is growing kinder toward the fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic pursuit of joy is no longer frowned down by anaemic and hypocritical philosophies.  The old gods of energy and joy are coming to their own again, and the lives of strong men and fair women are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of curates and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has begun to find out her mistake, and is out for her share of the fun and the foolishness with the rest.  Negative morality is fast becoming discredited, and many an old “Thou shalt not” is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue Laws of Connecticut.  “Self-development, not self-sacrifice,”—­a favourite dictum of Grant Allen’s,—­is growing more and more to be the formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion is being reduced to a rational limit.  One form of self-sacrifice, at all events, is no longer demanded of us—­the wholesale sacrifice of our own opinions.  The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the modification of conditions.  Nowadays we recognize that there are as many “rights”