dead within the heart of middle age. It breaks out now and then on a bright spring day when the sun is shining and the lark is singing, and when perennial hope points to yet brighter days to come. For hope sings songs even to the grey-haired, difficult as the young may find it to believe it. We were surely meant to be happy, we humans, so indomitable is the inclination towards joyfulness under circumstances the most adverse. It is easy enough in youth, and even the sceptic, the pessimist, the cynic, if they live long enough, will find that it is not so very difficult in middle age, when scepticism, pessimism, and cynicism are apt to be outgrown. There lies the true secret of the matter. There is a joy in growth, and we must see to it that we do not cheat ourselves of it. Stunted natures are seldom happy ones, and their middle age is merely mental shrinkage, with a narrowing of the heart and a corresponding drought in all the sources of joy.

The gist of the matter.

In one of Christina Rossetti’s loveliest songs, she refers to the meeting in a better world of two who loved and were parted here. And in the last line she wistfully and pathetically asks: “But shall we be young and together?” There lies the whole gist of the matter. If we are to be young again, what boots it if the loved faces of long ago are lacking? Could happiness be indeed happiness without these?

“After many years.”

Memory’s magic.

Sometimes two who have loved each other in their youth meet again when middle age has come to both. Such a meeting can never be commonplace to either. Nor do the two see each other as they are visible to ordinary acquaintances. In the eyes of memory, the grey hair is replaced by the sunny locks of youth; the saddened eyes are bright again and eagerly out-looking into a world of abundant promise; the worn and furrowed brow becomes smooth and white, the pale cheeks touched with youthful bloom; and with a delicious sense of reciprocity each knows that the lost youth of both is present to the mind of either. Neither says inwardly of the other, “Oh, what a change!” as is the case with ordinary acquaintances. Oh, no! For each of these two the other is young again. They are both young again, and together. The gentle wraiths of past joys take them by the hand and lead them back to youth’s enchanted land, to the days when love touched everything with a radiant finger, turning the world and the future celestial rosy red.

“Fed on minors.”

What middle-aged women regret is the well-remembered friends that were their companions in the old days, “when morning souls did leap and run.” And now they are “fed on minors” when they pause and listen to their thoughts and the rhythm that they make. “The world’s book now reads drily,” except, indeed, for such as are enwrapped and mummified in the garments of the reiterant daily commonplace.

The wider view.

The only way to subdue regrets is to take the wider view, looking out on the great world as might a mouse from the granary door, over hill and dale and stream and distant town, blue sky and far green sea, realising how infinitesimally small a part of the whole is each individual life. There is a kind of comfort, after all, in insignificance. And can anything be more redolent of that quality than middle age?

“What is it all but a trouble of gnats
In the gleam of a million million of worlds?”