Life is an ecstasy. Life
is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold
pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field,
the Irishman in the ditch, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods,
the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain
pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it. Health and
appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We fancy that
our civilization has got on far, but we still come back to our primers.
Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is pathetic in its name, and in his use of the
name. It is an admission from a man of the world in the London of 1850,
that poor old Puritan Bunyan was right in his perception of the London of
1650. And yet now, in Thackeray, is the added wisdom or skepticism, that
though this be really so, he must yet live in tolerance of and practically
in homage and obedience to these illusions.
The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in
Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height.
Nobody drops his domino.
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