We went and walked in the garden; he stopped before some giant hemlocks. "Just look at those great things," he said, "built up as geometrically as a cathedral, tier above tier, and yet not _quite_ regular. There must be something very hard at work inside that, piling it all up, adding cell to cell, carrying out a plan, and enjoying it all. Yet the beauty of it is that it isn't perfectly regular. You see the underlying scheme, yet the separate shoots are not quite mechanical--they lean away from each other, that joint is a trifle shorter--there wasn't quite room at the start in that stem, and the pressure goes on showing right up to the top, I suppose our lives would look very nearly as geometrical to anyone who _knew_--really knew; but how little geometrical we feel! I don't suppose this hemlock is cursed by the power of thinking it might have done otherwise, or envies the roses. We mustn't spend time in envying, or repenting either--or still less in renouncing life." "But if I want to renounce it," I said, "why shouldn't I?" "Yes, there you have me," said Father Payne; "we know so little about ourselves, that we don't always know whether we do better to renounce a thing or to seize it. Make experiments, I say--don't make habits." "But you are always drilling me into habits," I said. He gave me a little shake with his hand. "Yes, the habit of being able to do a thing," he said, "not the habit of being unable to do anything else! Hang these metaphysics, if that is what they are! What I want you young men to do is to get a firm hold upon life, and to feel that it is a finer thing than any little presentment of it. I want you to feel and enjoy for yourselves, and to live freely and generously. Bad things happen to all of us, of course; but we mustn't mind that--not to be petty or quarrelsome, or hidebound or prudish or over-particular, that's the point. To leave other people alone, except on the rare occasions when they are not letting other people alone; to be peaceable, and yet not to be afraid; not to be hurt and vexed; to practise forgetting; not to want to pouch things! It's all very well for me to talk," he said; "I made a sufficient hash of it, when I was poor and miserable and overworked; and then I was transplanted out of a slum window-box into a sunny garden, just in time; yet I'm sure that most of my old troubles were in a way of my own making, because I hated being so insignificant; but I fear that was a little poison lurking in me from the Earls of Shropshire. That is the odd thing about ambitions, that they seem so often like regaining a lost position rather than making a new one. The truth is that we are caged; and the only thing to do is to think about the cage as little as we can." XXVIII OF CRYSTALS