A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
AND OTHER ESSAYS

A
HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY
AGNES REPPLIER, Litt. D.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1908

The half-century, whose more familiar aspectsthis little book is designed to illustrate, hasspread its boundary lines. Nothing is so hardto deal with as a period. Nothing is so unmanageableas a date. People will be born afew years too early; they will live a few yearstoo long. Events will happen out of time. Theclosely linked decades refuse to be separated,and my half-century, that I thought so compact,widened imperceptibly while I wrote.

I have filled my canvas with trivial things,with intimate details, with what now seem theinsignificant aspects of life. But the insignificantaspects of life concern us mightily whilewe live; and it is by their help that we understandthe insignificant people who are sometimesreckoned of importance. A hundredyears ago many men and women were reckonedof importance, at whose claims their successorsto-day smile scornfully. Yet they and their[viii]work were woven into the tissue of things, intothe warp and woof of social conditions, intothe literary history of England. An hour isnot too precious to waste upon them, howeverfeeble their pretensions. Perhaps some idlereader in the future will do as much by us.

A. R.