It is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else. - Lewis Carroll

The dying crimson of the West That faintly tinged his haggard cheek, Fell on her as she stood, and shed A glory round the patient head.

Fair stands the ancient Rectory, The Rectory of Croft, The sun shines bright upon it, The breezes whisper soft. From all the house and garden Its inhabitants come forth, And muster in the road without, And pace in twos and threes about, The children of the North.

I believe this thought, of the possibility of death — if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life — that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' — but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man — and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!