Some persons feel this so strongly, wondering why the preacher forgot this item in his list of vanities, that you may hear them loudly vowing that never again will they be caught in the act of making a present....
So far about the mistaken view of the subject; now for the right one, which is mine: the result of great experience and of infinite meditation, all coming to a head in that recent perplexed business of choosing a present for the lady with the diamonds and pearls. And before proceeding further, let me say that my experience is really exceptional. Not that I have given many gifts, or that I am in the least certain that the few I have given were not the usual Dead Sea apples; but because I have been, what is much more to the point, a great receiver of presents, my room, my house containing nothing beautiful or pleasant that is not a present from some dear friend, or (the paradox will be explained later on) a present from myself. A great receiver of presents, also, because presents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so always ever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving all through my life a particular permeating charm connected with certain dates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needles slightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that all very delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort of gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children, _Bescheerung_. For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly believe, nothing but a long act of courtship, then, surely, its exquisite things--summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear--all these, and all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts.
A present, then, may be defined as a _thing which one wants given by a person whom one likes_. But our English syntax falls short of my meaning, for what I would wish to say is rather, in Teutonic fashion, "a by a person one likes to one given object one wants." The stress of the sentence should be laid on the word _wants_. For much of the charm, and most of the dignity, of a gift depends on its being _a thing one would otherwise have done without_.