“though wise in show, That with superfluous burden loads the day, And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.” “Melancholy commonly flies to the future for its aliment,” says Sydney Smith, “and it must be encountered,” he adds, “by diminishing the range of our views.” The great remedy for melancholy, he insists in another place, is to “take short views of life.” Are you happy now? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all? For “every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.” One of his correspondents he emphatically counsels to dispel that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence. “We know nothing of to-morrow, our business is to be good and happy to day.” In effect, like Maucroix, “Il rit de ces prudents qui, par trop de sagesse, S’en vont dans l’avenir chercher de la tristesse Et des soucis cuisants.” Once and again in his autobiography does the most influential, perhaps, of French philosophers avow his resolve _á vivre désormais au jour la journée_, to take short views of life, and regard distant objects as at once illusive and elusory. “Usons de chaque jour sans trop de prévoyance du lendemain,” says another. And it was an old French poet, fourscore and upwards, who in 1700 wrote the four verses which since then have been often cited: “Chaque jour est un bien que du ciel je reçois, Je jouis aujourd’hui de celui qu’il me donne; Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’a moi, Et celui de demain n’appartient a personne.”