THE SECRET OF LONG LIFE. CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY. LENGTH OF LIFE wholly depends upon ideas. This aphorism has a double significance. There are men who live longer in a day than others in a year: for their brain is thronged with thoughts, as the halls of an emperor's palace are thronged with knights and ladies, with courtiers and minstrels and guards. There is never dulness in the stately edifice : even when night comes, and the festival is over, the nightingales sing in the pleasaunce, and the rivulets murmur a soft under-song. B All the hours are full of life and thought. He who lives thus, though he die in youth, has a far longer span of existence than the peasant-churl who ploughs and delves, eats and sleeps, unconscious of an idea; even than the lucky aristocrat who has nothing to do save enjoy life, and who frequently finds himself extremely bored. And often it happens that the intense energy of a great thinker wears out his spirit's tenement; that he dies young, having left his work half fulfilled. But he has lived long for all that; he needs no pity from those who deem it the acme of good fortune to pass a torpid century on this earth's surface. But there is a second meaning to the aphorism. Ideas prolong the actual duration of life. A great soul is full of power, and takes easily the accidents of the world. Ideas are the blossoms of the spiritual tree: when they are abundant and noble you know that it is in vigour of health. To think is to live. |