Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 August 1884 — Once is Enoughs [ARTICLE]

Once is Enoughs

Though most people do their best to prolong life, few are in favor of repeating it. Even with the wisdom acquired in a lifetime to arm one for the battle, nobody longs to go back and try it over again. Indeed, those who are honest admit that they could not do it; that knowing what the ordeal is they would have no courage to begin it. Each seems to feel as he nears the end of the intricate and tiresome journey that he has been miraculously preserved; that another time he might net be so fortunate. The greater his accumulation of wisdom the more certain he is of this. Nothing is more destructive to self conceit than living. It is not the disabled, the defeated, and the baffled alone who rejoice that the business of life is one that can have no repetition. The successful, the honored, the envied—those who are considered victors—entertain the same feeling. They rejoice that ft is not to be done over again. No one wants to live his childhood over again, although that stage of his existance may have been comparatively a happy one. Maturity has taught him that it was inferior; and sad as his wisdom is, he would not exchange it for the crude .bliss of ignorance. The middle-aged man sighs, perhaps, that his youth has been spent unprofitably, but he does not want it back again. The patriarch boasts of his days of strong young manhood, but he would not go back and live them over if he could. No, he does not wish to live it over again, not in his happiest hours. They are all -safe in memory, and he speaks of them with a smile and a sigh, but he does not ask for them again. Yet they were full of honor, crowded with love and crowned with success. And the aged woman whose girlhood was a blaze of belledom, and whose” early woomanhood was rich in happiness : Does she sigh repeat her vanished years? If asked she would say: “Onge is enough:” And -So everywhere the same refusal to go through it all would be heard. “Once is enough." Who, after reading the poets, could return to the primer and find it endurable? "Who either wishes or needs to learn- the same lesson twice ? Once is enough.