There may be, nay, I think there must be, a meaning and a moral to this disgust of the enlightened here and now, this longing for a life not all “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” But the interpretations of this feeling we most commonly meet with are not I hope to be taken very seriously, for if they are, there is no counsel for us but one of despair. Thus, whatever could come of the lament for the good old days, the golden days, before science had done this or that to cloud our first innocence? No history written in such ancient times but that it can recall times still more ancient when things went better with the sons of the gods because then they knew less. And it is still open to any one--traveler, philosopher, poet--to draw what picture he will of far away lands wherein, for that nobody wanted very much, everybody found all he wanted. The subject of this sketch may vary from Diogenes snarling in his tub to a Typee girl dancing in her flowers; from the desert to which the Christian cenobites withdrew to Tasso’s bosky places, where, before that vain word Onore had mingled its grief with love, Sedean pastori e ninfe, Meschiando alle parole Vezzi e susurri, ed ai susurri i baci Strettamente tenaci ... But of all this, nothing is serious, nothing sincere,--of all those who lament the past not one would take the first step toward it, so little is it in man’s nature to retreat. Or if anyone would, yet what could he do, save drag his own sadness into the desert with him? As for the world, it must even go on with its science, though it be but the science of hurting itself. Wherefore, no less futile than regret for a past we cannot recover, is fear for a future we cannot avert. It is natural that certain conditions arising out of the progress of science should make gentle souls anxious for what is to come. Science is power, and as no man can commit the sins he is impotent to commit, there is a certain safeguard for innocence in ignorance. Only after having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge did our first parents come to mourn outside the gates. No shepherds and shepherdesses conceived the iniquity of Babel’s tower, and Egypt and great Babylon were of no children’s dreaming. Yet must man go on gathering unto himself knowledge with all its power for harm and no warning gesture of the fearful can stay him. Our only comfort can be that however great a power for harm science may bring, it ought to enhance in equal measure the power for good,--did we but know what good and evil were.