Will you live? or will you be embalmed? Will you live, though it be astride of a sunbeam; or will you repose safely in the catacombs for a thousand years? In the former case, the worst accident that can happen is that you may break your neck . Will you break your heart, your soul, to save your neck? Necks and pipe-stems are fated to be broken.Men make a great ado about the folly of demanding too much of life (or of eternity?), and of endeavoring to live according to that demand . It is much ado about nothing. No harm ever came from that quarter.
I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.I shall be sorry to remember that I was there, but noticed nothing remarkable,-not so much as a prince in disguise; lived in the golden age a hired man;visited Olympus even, but fell asleep after dinner, and did not hear the conversation of the gods. I lived in Judaea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries!
If there is anything more glorious than a congress of men a-framing or amending of a constitution going on, which I suspect there is, I desire to see the morning papers.I am greedy of the faintest rumor, though it were got by listening at the key-hole . I will dissipate myself in that direction.
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