"O the joy of manly self-hood! To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown, To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic, To look with calm gaze or with flashing eye, To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest, To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth. "O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror, No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms, To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground, proving my interior soul impregnable, And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me. "For not life's joys alone I sing, repeating--the joy of death! The beautiful touch of death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons, Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn'd, or render'd to powder, or buried, My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres, My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, further offices, eternal uses of the earth. "O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys! To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on! To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports, A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys." Whitman, with this wild ecstasy, to be sure is an Epicurean and something more. Indeed, pure Epicureanism, unmixed with better elements, is rather hard to find in modern literature. One other hymn, by Robert Louis Stevenson, likewise adds to pure Epicureanism a note of strenuous intensity in the great task of happiness which was foreign to the more easy-going form of the ancient doctrine. In Stevenson Epicureanism is only a flavour to more substantial viands. THE CELESTIAL SURGEON "If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness; If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face; If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not; if morning skies, Books, and my food, and summer rain Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:-- Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake! Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, Choose thou, before that spirit die, A piercing pain, a killing sin, And to my dead heart run them in." While we are with Stevenson, we may as well conclude our selections from the Epicurean scriptures in these words from his Christmas Sermon: "Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality: they are the perfect duties. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say, 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better men." II THE EPICUREAN VIEW OF WORK AND PLAY