Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

Sir Walter Scott had a pleasant phrase for middle life; he called it reaching the other side of the hill. It is a stage which no doubt has its drawbacks. The wind is not so good, the limbs are not so tireless as in the ascent; the stride is shortened, and since we are descending we must be careful in placing the feet. But on the upward road the view was blocked by the slopes and there was no far prospect to be had except by looking backwards. Now the course is mercifully adapted to failing legs, we can rest and reflect since the summit has been passed, and there is a wide country before us, though the horizon is mist and shadow.

These chapters have been written several thousand miles from England, in a country of new problems and hopes, where the mind has, none the less, been clouded by the secular anxieties of Europe. Half-detached and half-embroiled, Canada's position seems to me much like my own. I have in my lifetime passed from an era of peace through various unsettled stages into a world which, in Sir Thomas More's phrase, is "ruffled and fallen into a wildness," but I retain enough of the disengagement of the earlier world to refuse to surrender my right to cheerfulness. I was brought up in times when one was not ashamed to be happy, and I have never learned the art of discontent. I preserve my devotion to things "afar from the sphere of our sorrow. " It seems to me that those who loudly proclaim their disenchantment with life have never been really enchanted by it. Their complaints about the low levels they dwell in ring hollow, for they have not known the uplands.