It is an old story, a theme too worn for the turning of sentences, and yet too living a moral not to find every day a new point and to break a fresh heart, that our lives are wasted in the pursuit of the impalpable, the search for the impossible and the unmeaning. Neither today nor yesterday, but throughout the whole life of the race, the complaint has gone forth that all is vanity; that the ends for which we live and we die are 'mere ideas,' illusions begotten on the brain by the wish of the heart, poor phrases that stir the blood, until experience or reflection for a little, and death for all time bring with it disenchantment and quiet. Duty for duty's sake, life for an end beyond sense, honour, and beauty, and love for the invisible-all these are first felt, and then seen to be dream, shadow and unreal vision. And our cry and our desire is for something that will satisfy us, something that we know and do not only think, something that is real and solid, that we can lay hold of and be sure of, and that will now change in our hands. We have said good-by to our transcensdent longings, we have bidden a sad but an enternal fare-well to the hopes of our own and of the world's too credulous youth; we have parted for ever from our early loves, from our fancies and aspirations beyond the human. We seek for the tangible, and we find it in this world; for the knowledge which can never deceive, and that is the certainty of our own well-being; we seek for the palpable, and we feel it; fore the end which well satisfy us as men, and we find it in happiness. Happiness! Is that climax, or bathos, or cruel irony? Happiness is the end? Yes, happiness is the end which indeed we all reach after; for what more can we wish than that all should be well with us-that our wants should be filled, and the desire of our hearts be gratified? And happiness can not escape us, we must know it when we find it? Oh yes, it would be strange indeed to come to such a consummation, and never to know it. And happiness is real and palpable, and we can find it by seeking it? But what is happiness? In the end we can answer only what happiness is not.