As each life, therefore, has its ambitions--small or great--its conquests, its trials, and its failures, so each day has to bear its own burden of trials and anxieties; and as the daily life is lived, and the daily task accomplished, so will our life's work be fulfilled; but how few there are who can look back and say their lives have been a success, and that they have accomplished all they should or all they might have done.
A great philosopher and thinker, who passed away only recently, stated, on the Jubilee of his Professorship, when his contemporaries were saying that future generations would proclaim him as having accomplished greater things than Sir Isaac Newton, that "his life had not been a success, that he had given his time and his mental powers to the solution of practical problems of everyday life rather than to the claims of the higher philosophy;" and so, in our more humble spheres each of us must feel that we have neglected opportunities, and perhaps the opportunities which we most regret having neglected are those by which we could have done good to our fellow-men, and not those which made for the satisfying of our ambition.
There can be no isolation more dreary than the isolation of an old age, cut off by the lack of training and habit from sympathy with humanity, alone in its selfishness, untouched by the joy of feeling and caring for others. But even short of this isolation of a selfish old age, there must come to all of us a feeling of disappointment that our part in helping forward the well-being of others has not been larger and more fruitful:
"Frail is the web the tired worker weaves Left incomplete: Fair was life's promise, scanty are its sheaves; What are its laurels, but a few sere leaves Withering beneath our feet."
I will, however, cease to moralise, and will conclude with this thought which, I think, forms an appropriate preface to an autobiography.
How much greater would be the sum total of human happiness if men would accept as their guide the experience of those who had gone before! How many disasters might be avoided! How many successful careers might be shaped and built up! But I suppose as long as men are as they are they will refuse to accept the experience of others, but will make their own, and through blunders and mistakes a certain proportion will arrive at success, but a larger proportion will struggle on, on the ragged edge and under the cold shade of adversity until the end of their days.