Chapter XIV: Part 14

Here are a few sentences from the long letters which the author of the Bridge of Sighs wrote to the children of his friend, Dr. Elliot, then residing at Sandgate, almost from his death-bed: "My dear Jeanie,--So you are at Sandgate! Of course, wishing for your old play fellow to help you to make little puddles in the sand, and swing on the gate. But perhaps there are no sand and gate at Sandgate, which, in that case, nominally tells us a fib.... I have heard that you bathe in the sea, which is very refreshing, but it requires care; for if you stay under water too long, you may come up a mermaid, who is only half a lady, with a fish's tail--which she can boil if she likes. You had better try this with your doll, whether it turns her into half a 'doll-fin.'... I hope you like the sea. I always did when I was a child, which was about two years ago. Sometimes it makes such a fizzing and foaming, I wonder some of our London cheats do not bottle it up and sell it for ginger-pop. When the sea is too rough, if you pour the sweet oil out of the cruet all over it, and wait for a calm, it will be quite smooth--much smoother than a dressed salad.... Do you ever see any boats or vessels? And don't you wish, when you see a ship, that somebody was a sea-captain instead of a doctor, that he might bring you home a pet lion, or calf-elephant, ever so many parrots, or a monkey from foreign parts? I knew a little girl who was promised a baby-whale by her sailor-brother, and who blubbered because he did not bring it. I suppose there are no whales at Sandgate, but you might find a seal about the beach; or at least a stone for one. The sea-stones are not pretty when they are dry, but look beautiful when they are wet--and we can always keep sucking them!" To Jeanie's brother, among other things he writes, "I used to catch flat-fish with a very long string line. It was like swimming a kite. Once I caught a plaice, and seeing it all over red spots, thought I had caught the measles." To Mary Elliot, a still more youthful correspondent, he says, "I remember that when I saw the sea, it used sometimes to be very fussy and fidgety, and did not always wash itself quite clean; but it was very fond of fun. Have the waves ever run after you yet, and turned your little two shoes into pumps, full of water? Have you been bathed yet in the sea, and were you afraid? I was the first time, and the time before that; and, dear me, how I kicked and screamed--or, at least, meant to scream; but the sea, ships and all, began to run into my mouth, and so I shut it up. I think I see you being dipped into the sea, screwing your eyes up, and putting your nose, like a button, into your mouth, like a button-hole, for fear of getting another smell and taste. Did you ever try, like a little crab, to run two ways at once? See if you can do it, for it is good fun; never mind tumbling over yourself a little at first.... And now good-by; Fanny has made my tea, and I must drink it before it gets too hot, as we all were last Sunday week. They say the glass was eighty-eight in the shade, which is a great age. The last fair breeze I blew dozens of kisses for you, but the wind changed, and, I am afraid, took them all to Miss H----, or somebody that it shouldn't."

You remember the anecdote Southey repeats in his Doctor, of a physician who, being called in to an unknown patient, found him suffering under the deepest depression of mind, without any discoverable disease, or other assignable cause. The physician advised him to seek for cheerful objects, and recommended him especially to go to the theatre and see a famous actor then in the meridian of his powers, whose comic talents were unrivaled. Alas! the comedian who kept crowded theatres in a roar was this poor hypochondriac himself!

XII.

CONDUCT.

Hazlitt, in one of his discursive essays, says, "I stopped these two days at Bridgewater, and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of its muddy river, returned to the inn and read Camilla. So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy; but wanting that have wanted everything." Alas! who has not wanted one thing? Fortunatus had a cap, which when he put on, and wished himself anywhere, behold he was there. Aladdin had a lamp, which if he rubbed, and desired anything, immediately it was his. If we each had both, there would still be something wanting--one thing more. Donatello's matchless statue of St. George "wanted one thing," in the opinion of Michel Angelo; it wanted "the gift of speech." The poor widow in Holland that Pepys tells us about in his Diary, who survived twenty-five husbands, wanted one thing more, no doubt--perhaps one more husband. "Hadst thou Samson's hair, Milo's strength, Scanderbeg's arm, Solomon's wisdom, Absalom's beauty, Croesus's wealth, Caesar's valor, Alexander's spirit, Tully's or Demosthenes's eloquence, Gyges's ring, Perseus's Pegasus, and Gorgon's head, Nestor's years to come, all this," saith Burton, "would not make thee absolute, give thee content and true happiness in this life, or so continue it." Proverbially, we never are, but always to be, blest. "A child," said the good Sachs, "thinks the stars blossom on the trees; when he climbs to the tree-tops, he fancies they cluster on the spire; when he climbs the spire, he finds, to reach them, he must leave the earth and go to heaven." There is an old German engraving, in the manner of Holbein, which represents an aged man near a grave, wringing his hands. Death, behind, directs his attention to heaven. In the palace Sciarra is a very expressive picture by Schedone. On the ruins of an old tomb stands a skull, beneath which is written--"I, too, was of Arcadia;" and, at a little distance, gazing at it in attitudes of earnest reflection, stand two shepherds, struck simultaneously with the moral. What we have is nothing, what we want, everything. "All worldly things," says Baxter, "appear most vain and unsatisfactory, when we have tried them most." The prize we struggled for, which filled our imagination, when attained was not much; worthless in grasp, priceless in expectation. The one thing we want is one thing we have not--that we have not had.

"I saw the little boy,
In thought how oft that he
Did wish of God, to scape the rod,
A tall young man to be.

"The young man eke that feels
His bones with pain opprest,
How he would be a rich old man,
To live and lie at rest:

"The rich old man that sees
His end draw on so sore,
How he would be a boy again,
To live so much the more."

This hunger, this hope, this longing, is our best possession at last, and fades not away, unsubstantial as it may seem. It builds for each one of us magnificent castles. "All the years of our youth and the hopes of our manhood are stored away, like precious stones, in the vaults; and we know that we shall find everything convenient, elegant, and splendid, when we come into possession." Curtis, in one of his exquisite sketches, treats this element of us as no other author has. He calls it his Spanish property. "I am the owner," he says, "of great estates; but the greater part are in Spain. It is a country famously romantic, and my castles are all of perfect proportions, and appropriately set in the most picturesque situations. I have never been to Spain myself, but I have, naturally, conversed much with travelers to that country, although, I must allow, without deriving from them much substantial information about my property there. The wisest of them told me that there were more holders of real estate in Spain than in any other region he had ever heard of, and they are all great proprietors. Every one of them possesses a multitude of the stateliest castles. From conversation with them you easily gather that each one considers his own castles much the largest and in the loveliest positions.... It is remarkable that none of the proprietors have ever been to Spain to take possession and report to the rest of us the state of our property there. I, of course, cannot go, I am too much engaged. So is Titbottom. And I find that it is the case with all the proprietors. We have so much to detain us at home that we cannot get away. It is always so with rich men.... It is not easy for me to say how I know so much as I certainly do about my castles in Spain. The sun always shines upon them. They stand large and fair in a luminous, golden atmosphere, a little hazy and dreamy, perhaps, like the Indian summer, but in which no gales blow and there are no tempests. All the sublime mountains, and beautiful valleys, and soft landscapes, that I have not yet seen, are to be found in the grounds. They command a noble view of the Alps; so fine, indeed, that I should be quite content with the prospect of them from the highest tower of my castle, and not care to go to Switzerland. The neighboring ruins, too, are as picturesque as those of Italy, and my desire of standing in the Coliseum and of seeing the shattered arches of the aqueducts, stretching along the Campagna, and melting into the Alban Mount, is entirely quenched. The rich gloom of my orange groves is gilded by fruit as brilliant of complexion and exquisite of flavor as any that ever dark-eyed Sorrento girls, looking over the high plastered walls of Southern Italy, hand to the youthful travelers, climbing on donkeys up the narrow lane beneath. The Nile flows through my grounds. The Desert lies upon their edge, and Damascus stands in my garden. I am given to understand, also, that the Parthenon has been removed to my Spanish possessions. The Golden Horn is my fish preserve; my flocks of golden fleece are pastured on the plain of Marathon, and the honey of Hymettus is distilled from the flowers that grow in the vale of Enna--all in my Spanish domains. From the windows of these castles look the beautiful women whom I have never seen, whose portraits the poets have painted. They wait for me there, and chiefly the fair-haired child, lost to my eye so long ago, now bloomed into an impossible beauty. The lights that never shone glance at evening in the vaulted halls, upon banquets that were never spread. The bands I have never collected play all night long, and enchant the brilliant company, that was never assembled, into silence. In the long summer mornings the children that I never had, play in the gardens that I never planted.... I have often wondered how I shall ever reach my castles. The desire of going comes over me very strongly sometimes, and I endeavor to see how I can arrange my affairs so as to get away. To tell the truth, I am not quite sure of the route,--I mean, to that particular part of Spain in which my estates lie. I have inquired very particularly, but nobody seems to know precisely.... Will you tell me what you consider the shortest and safest route thither, Mr. Bourne? for, of course, a man who drives such an immense trade with all parts of the world will know all that I have come to inquire.' 'My dear sir,' answered he, wearily, 'I have been trying all my life to discover it; but none of my ships have ever been there--none of my captains have any report to make. They bring me, as they brought my father, gold-dust from Guinea; ivory, pearls, and precious stones from every part of the earth; but not a fruit, not a solitary flower, from one of my castles in Spain. I have sent clerks, agents, and travelers of all kinds; philosophers, pleasure-hunters, and invalids, in all sorts of ships, to all sorts of places, but none of them ever saw or heard of my castles, except one young poet, and he died in a mad-house.'... At length I resolved to ask Titbottom if he had ever heard of the best route to our estates. He said that he owned castles, and sometimes there was an expression in his face as if he saw them.... 'I have never known but two men who reached their estates in Spain.' 'Indeed,' said I, 'how did they go?' 'One went over the side of a ship, and the other out of a third story window,' answered Titbottom. 'And I know one man that resides upon his estates constantly,' continued he. 'Who is that?' 'Our old friend Slug, whom you may see any day at the asylum, just coming in from the hunt, or going to call upon his friend the Grand Lama, or dressing for the wedding of the Man in the Moon, or receiving an embassador from Timbuctoo. Whenever I go to see him, Slug insists that I am the pope, disguised as a journeyman carpenter, and he entertains me in the most distinguished manner. He always insists upon kissing my foot, and I bestow upon him, kneeling, the apostolic benediction. This is the only Spanish proprietor in possession, with whom I am acquainted.'... Ah! if the true history of Spain could be written, what a book were there!"

"Gayly bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

"But he grew old,
This knight so bold,
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

"And as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow:
'Shadow,' said he,
'Where can it be--
This land of Eldorado?'

"'Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,'
The shade replied,
'If you seek for Eldorado!'"

Steele, in a paper of The Spectator, dilates in this vein. "I am," he says, "one of that species of men who are properly denominated castle-builders, who scorn to be beholden to the earth for a foundation, or dig in the bowels of it for materials; but erect their structures in the most unstable of elements, the air; fancy alone laying the line, marking the extent, and shaping the model. It would be difficult to enumerate what august palaces and stately porticoes have grown under my forming imagination, or what verdant meadows and shady groves have started into being by the powerful feat of a warm fancy. A castle-builder is ever just what he pleases, and as such I have grasped imaginary sceptres, and delivered uncontrollable edicts, from a throne to which conquered nations yielded obeisance. There is no art or profession, whose most celebrated masters I have not eclipsed. Wherever I have afforded my salutary presence, fevers have ceased to burn and agues to shake the human fabric. When an eloquent fit has been upon me, an apt gesture and proper cadence has animated each sentence, and gazing crowds have found their passions worked up into a rage, or soothed into a calm. I am short, and not very well made; yet upon sight of a fine woman, I have stretched into proper stature, and killed with a good air and mien. These are the gay phantoms that dance before my waking eyes, and compose my day-dreams. I should be the most contented happy man alive, were the chimerical happiness which springs from the paintings of fancy less fleeting and transitory. But alas! it is with grief of mind I tell you, the least breath of wind has often demolished my magnificent edifices, swept away my groves, and left no more trace of them than if they had never been. My exchequer has sunk and vanished by a rap on my door, the salutation of a friend has cost me a whole continent, and in the same moment I have been pulled by the sleeve, my crown has fallen from my head. The ill consequence of these reveries is inconceivably great, seeing the loss of imaginary possessions makes impressions of real woe. Besides, bad economy is visible and apparent in builders of invisible mansions. My tenants' advertisements of ruins and dilapidations often cast a damp on my spirits, even in the instant when the sun, in all his splendor, gilds my Eastern palaces."

"Alas!" cries Heine, in his Confessions, "fame, once sweet as sugared pine-apple and flattery, has for a long time been nauseous to me; it tastes as bitter to me now as wormwood. With Romeo I can say, 'I am the fool of fortune.' The bowl stands full before me, but I lack the spoon. What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in the choicest wines, drunk from golden goblets, if at the same time I, with all that makes life pleasant denied to me, may only wet my lips with an insipid, disagreeable, medicinal drink? What benefit is it to me that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel wreaths, if meanwhile the shriveled fingers of an aged hired nurse press a blister of Spanish flies to the back of my head? What does it avail me that all the roses of Sharon tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas! Sharon is two thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where I in the dreary solitude of my sick-room have nothing to smell, unless it be the perfume of warmed-over poultices."

"When I look around me," said Goethe, "and see how few of the companions of earlier years are left to me, I think of a summer residence at a bathing-place. When you arrive, you first become acquainted with those who have already been there some weeks, and who leave you in a few days. This separation is painful. Then you turn to the second generation, with which you live a good while, and become really intimate. But this goes also, and leaves us lonely with the third, which comes just as we are going away, and with which we have, properly, nothing to do.... I have ever been considered one of Fortune's chiefest favorites; nor can I complain of the course my life has taken. Yet, truly, there has been nothing but toil and care; and in my seventy-fifth year, I may say that I have never had four weeks of genuine pleasure. The stone was ever to be rolled up anew."

"What a multitude of past friends can I number amongst the dead!" exclaimed another venerable worthy in literature. "It is the melancholy consequence of old age; if we outlive our feelings we are nothing worth; if they remain in force, a thousand sad occurrences remind us that we live too long." It was Sir William Temple's opinion that "life is like wine; who would drink it pure must not draw it to the dregs." Dr. Sherlock thought "the greatest part of mankind have great reason to be contented with the shortness of life, because they have no temptation to wish it longer." De Tocqueville said, "Man is a traveler toward a colder and colder region, and the higher his latitude, the faster ought to be his walk. The great malady of the soul is cold. It must be combated by activity and exertion, by contact with one's fellow-creatures, and with the business of the world. In these days one must not live upon what one has already learnt, one must learn more; and instead of sleeping away our acquired ideas, we should seek for fresh ones, make the new opinions fight with the old ones, and those of youth with those of an altered state of thought and of society."

The following authentic memorial was found in the closet of Abdalrahman, who established the throne of Cordova, and who, during his life, enjoyed thousands of wives, millions upon millions of wealth, and was the object of universal admiration and envy: "I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honor, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen. O man, place not thy confidence in this present world!"

Voltaire makes Candide sit down to supper at Venice with six strangers who were staying at the same hotel with himself, and as the servants, to his astonishment, addressed each of them by the title of "your majesty," he asked for an explanation of the pleasantry. "I am not jesting," said the first, "I am Achmet III.; I was sultan several years; I dethroned my brother, and my nephew dethroned me. They have cut off the heads of my viziers; I shall pass the remainder of my days in the old seraglio; my nephew, the Sultan Mahmoud, sometimes permits me to travel for my health, and I have come to pass the Carnival at Venice." A young man who was close to Achmet spoke next, and said, "My name is Ivan; I have been Emperor of all the Russias; I was dethroned when I was in my cradle; my father and my mother have been incarcerated; I was brought up in prison; I have sometimes permission to travel attended by my keepers, and I have come to pass the Carnival at Venice." The third said, "I am Charles Edward, King of England; my father has surrendered his rights to me; I have fought to sustain them; my vanquishers have torn out the hearts of eight hundred of my partisans; I have been put into prison; I am going to Rome to pay a visit to my father, dethroned like my grandfather and myself, and I have come to pass the Carnival at Venice." The fourth then spoke, and said, "I am King of Poland; the fortune of war has deprived me of my hereditary states; my father experienced the same reverses; I resign myself to the will of Providence, like the Sultan Achmet, the Emperor Ivan, and the King Charles Edward, to whom God grant a long life; and I have come to pass the Carnival at Venice." The fifth said, "I am also King of Poland; I have lost my kingdom twice, but Providence has given me another in which I have done more good than all the kings of Sarmatia put together have ever done on the banks of the Vistula. I also resign myself to the will of Providence, and I have come to pass the Carnival at Venice." There remained a sixth monarch to speak. "Gentlemen," he said, "I am not as great a sovereign as the rest, but I, too, have been a king. I am Theodore, who was elected King of Corsica; I was called 'your majesty,' and at present am hardly called 'sir;' I have caused money to be coined, and do not now possess a penny; I have had two secretaries of state, and have now scarcely a servant; I have sat upon a throne, and was long in a prison in London, upon straw, and am afraid of being treated in the same manner here, although I have come, like your majesties, to pass the Carnival at Venice." The other five kings heard this confession with a noble compassion. Each of them gave King Theodore twenty sequins to buy some clothes and shirts. Candide presented him with a diamond worth two thousand sequins. "Who," said the five kings, "is this man who can afford to give a hundred times as much as any of us? Are you, sir, also a king?" "No, your majesties, and I have no desire to be."

Bacon's contemporary and cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, who was principal secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth and James I., and ultimately lord high treasurer, when he was acknowledged to be the ablest, as he appeared the most enviable, statesman of his time, wrote to a friend, "Give heed to one that hath sorrowed in the bright lustre of a court and gone heavily over the best seeming fair ground. It is a great task to prove one's honesty, and yet not spoil one's fortune.... I am pushed from the shore of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a court will bear me; I know it bringeth little comfort on earth; and he is, I reckon, no wise man that looketh this way to heaven." Bacon himself says, in one of his Essays, "Certainly great persons have need to borrow other men's opinions to think themselves happy; for if they judge by their own feeling they cannot find it; but if they think with themselves what others think of them, and that other men would fain be as they are, then they are happy as it were by report, when, perhaps, they find the contrary within; for they are the first that find their own griefs, though they be the last that find their own faults."

Madame de Stael, surrounded by the most brilliant men of genius, beloved by a host of faithful and devoted friends, the centre of a circle of unsurpassed attractions, was yet doomed to mourn "the solitude of life." A short time before her death, she said to Chateaubriand, "I am now what I have always been--lively and sad."

The illustrious Madame Recamier, "after forty years of unchallenged queenship in French society, constantly enveloped in an intoxicating incense of admiration and love won not less by her goodness and purity than by her beauty and grace," writes thus from Dieppe to her niece: "I am here in the centre of fetes, princesses, illuminations, spectacles. Two of my windows face the ball-room, the other two front the theatre. Amidst this clatter I am in a perfect solitude. I sit and muse on the shore of the ocean. I go over all the sad and joyous circumstances of my life. I hope you will be more happy than I have been."

Madame de Pompadour, recalling her follies, serious matters they were to her, said to the Prince de Soubise, "It is like reading a strange book; my life is an improbable romance; I do not believe it." "Gray hairs had come on like daylight streaming in,--daylight and a headache with it. Pleasure had gone to bed with the rouge on her cheeks."

"Ah!" wrote also Madame de Maintenon to her niece, "alas that I cannot give you my experience; that I could only show you the weariness of soul by which the great are devoured--the difficulty which they find in getting through their days! Do you not see how they die of sadness in the midst of that fortune which has been a burden to them? I have been young and beautiful; I have tasted many pleasures; I have been universally beloved. At a more advanced age, I have passed years in the intercourse of talent and wit, and I solemnly protest to you that all conditions leave a frightful void."

Coleridge sums up all more wisely. "I have known," he says, "what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than three-score years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you that health is a great blessing,--competence obtained by honorable industry a great blessing,--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian."

"We are born and we live so unhappily that the accomplishment of a desire appears to us a falsehood, the realization of hope a deception, as if our sad experience had taught us the bitter lesson that in the world nothing is true but sorrow." "Who ordered toil," says Thackeray, "as the condition of life, ordered weariness, ordered sickness, ordered poverty, failure, success,--to this man a foremost place, to the other a nameless struggle with the crowd; to that a shameful fall, or paralyzed limb, or sudden accident; to each some work upon the ground he stands on, until he is laid beneath it." "Nature," says Pliny, "makes us buy her presents at the price of so many sufferings, that it is dubious whether she deserves most the name of a parent or a step-mother." "Solomon and Job judged the best and spake the truest," thought Pascal, "of human misery; the former the most happy, the latter the most unfortunate of mankind; the one acquainted by long experience with the vanity of pleasure, the other with the reality of affliction and pain."

"We must patiently suffer," says Montaigne, "the laws of our condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in spite of all physic. 'Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children; so soon as ever they are born, they thus salute them: 'Child, thou art come into the world to endure, suffer, and say nothing.'" "Half the miseries of human life," thought Hazlitt, "proceed from our not perceiving the incompatibility of different attainments, and consequently aiming at too much. We make ourselves wretched in vainly aspiring after advantages we are deprived of; and do not consider that if we had these advantages it would be quite impossible for us to retain those which we actually do possess, and which, after all, if it were put to the question, we would not consent to part with for the sake of any others." "Men of true wisdom and goodness," says Fielding, "are contented to take persons and things as they are, without complaining of their imperfections, or attempting to amend them; they can see a fault in a friend, or relation, or an acquaintance, without ever mentioning it to the parties themselves or to any others; and this often without lessening their affection: indeed, unless great discernment be tempered with this overlooking disposition, we ought never to contract friendships but with a degree of folly which we can deceive; for I hope my friends will pardon me when I declare, I know none of them without a fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine I had any friends who could not see mine. Forgiveness of this kind we give and demand in turn: it is an exercise of friendship, and perhaps none of the least pleasant, and this forgiveness we must bestow without desire of amendment. There is, perhaps, no surer mark of folly, than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we love: the finest composition of human nature, as well as the finest china, may have a flaw in it; and this, I am afraid, in either case, is equally incurable, though nevertheless the pattern may remain of the highest value." "In short," says Bulwer, "I suspect that every really skilled man of the world--as the world exists for its citizens in this nineteenth century--who, at the ripe age of forty, looks from the window of his club on the every-day mortals whom Fourier has hitherto failed to reform, has convinced him that, considering all the mistakes in our education and rearing,--all the temptations to which flesh and blood are exposed--all the trials which poverty inflicts on the poor--all the seductions which wealth whispers to the rich,--men, on the whole, are rather good than otherwise, and women, on the whole, are rather better than the men."

"Let a man examine his own thoughts," says Pascal, "and he will always find them employed about the time past or to come. We scarce bestow a glance upon the present; or, if we do, 'tis only to borrow light from hence to manage and direct the future. The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim. Thus we never live, but we ever hope to live; and under this continual disposition and preparation to happiness, 'tis certain we can never be actually happy, if our hopes are terminated with the scene of this life."

The Thracians, according to Pliny, estimated their lives mathematically, making careful study and count of each day before any event of it was forgotten. "Every day they put into an urn either a black or a white pebble, to denote the good or bad fortune of that day; at last they separated these pebbles, and upon comparing the two numbers together, they formed their judgment of the whole of their lives." But time, past or present,--time, what is it? "Who can readily and briefly explain this?" inquired St. Augustine. "Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly, than time? And we understand, when we speak of it; we understand, also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I explain it to one that asketh, I know not; yet I say boldly, that I know that if nothing passed away, time passed were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and that to come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity. If, therefore, time present, in order to be time at all, comes into existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that that is in existence, whose cause of being is that it shall not be? How is it that we cannot truly say that time is, but because it is tending not to be?" Comprehend this, and you see how easy a thing it was for the Thracians to "form a judgment of the whole of their lives"--to strike a nice balance between their happiness and their misery.

But happiness is as illusive as time, and is proved as perspicuously to be but a thing of memory, by the same venerable saint. "Where, then, and when," he says in his famous Confessions, "did I experience my happy life, that I should remember and love and long for it? Nor is it I alone, or some few besides, but we all would fain be happy; which, unless by some certain knowledge we knew, we should not with so certain a will desire. But how is this, that if two men be asked whether they would go to the wars, one, perchance, would answer that he would, the other that he would not; but if they were asked whether they would be happy, both would instantly, without any doubting, say they would; and for no other reason would the one go to the wars, and the other not, but to be happy. Is it, perchance, that as one looks for his joy in this thing, another in that, all agree in their desire of being happy, as they would agree, if they were asked, that they wished to have joy, and this joy they call a happy life? Although, then, one obtains the joy by one means, another by another, all have one end, which they strive to attain, namely, joy. Which being a thing which all must say they have experienced, it is, therefore, found in the memory, and recognized whenever the name of a happy life is mentioned." Now do you know, perhaps, what happiness is.

Coming down from Augustine to Helps,--"The wonder is that we live on from day to day learning so little the art of life. We are constantly victims of every sort of worry and petty misery, which it would seem a little bit of reflection and sensible conduct would remove. We constantly hang together when association only produces unhappiness. We know it, but do not remedy it.... We have no right to expect to meet many sympathetic people in the course of our lives. ["To get human beings together who ought to be together," said Sydney Smith, "is a dream." "If," said De Tocqueville, "to console you for having been born, you must meet with men whose most secret motives are always actuated by fine and elevated feelings, you need not wait, you may go and drown yourself immediately. But if you would be satisfied with a few men, whose actions are in general governed by those motives, and a large majority, who from time to time are influenced by them, you need not make such faces at the human race. Man with his vices, his weaknesses, and his virtues, strange combination though he be of good and evil, of grandeur and of baseness, is still, on the whole, the object most worthy of study, interest, pity, attachment, and admiration in the world; and since we have no angels, we cannot attach ourselves, or devote ourselves to anything greater or nobler than our fellow-creatures.... It is when estimating better one's fellow-men, one reckons them not by number but by worth; and this makes the world appear small. Then, without regard to distance, one seeks everywhere for the rare qualities which one has learned to appreciate."] The pleasant man to you is the man you can rely upon; who is tolerant, forbearing, and faithful.... Again, the habit of over-criticism is another hinderance to pleasantness. We are not fond of living always with our judges; and daily life will not bear the unwholesome scrutiny of an over-critical person." The petty annoyances and wanton bitternesses of life make us, in our impatience, sometimes wish to fly from all companionship; and contributed, no doubt,--he himself could not tell how much,--to make the author of the Genius of Solitude exclaim, with so much feeling, "Happy is he who, free from the iron visages that hurt him as they pass in the street, free from the vapid smiles and sneers of frivolous people, draws his sufficingness from inexhaustible sources always at his command when he is alone! Blest is he who, when disappointed, can turn from the affectations of an empty world and find solace in the generous sincerity of a full heart. To roam apart by the tinkling rill, to crouch in the grass where the crocus grows, to lie amid the clover where the honey-bee hums, gaze off into the still deeps of summer blue, and feel that your harmless life is gliding over the field of time as noiselessly as the shadow of a cloud; or, snuggled in furs, to trudge through the drifts amidst the unspotted scenery of winter, when Storm unfurls his dark banner in the sky, and Snow has camped on the hills and clad every stone and twig with his ermine, is pleasure surpassing any to be won in shallowly consorting with mobs of men."

"The longer I live," said Maurice de Guerin, "and the clearer I discern between true and false in society, the more does the inclination to live, not as a savage or a misanthrope, but as a solitary man on the frontiers of society, on the outskirts of the world, gain strength and grow in me. The birds come and go, and make nests around our habitations; they are fellow-citizens of our farms and hamlets with us: but they take their flight in a heaven which is boundless; the hand of God alone gives and measures to them their daily food; they build their nests in the heart of the thick bushes, and hang them in the height of the trees. So would I, too, live, hovering round society, and having always at my back a field of liberty vast as the sky."

A strange instance of abandonment of the world for a solitary life is given in the history of Henry Welby, the Hermit of Grub Street, who died in 1638, at the age of eighty-four. This example affords "an eccentric illustration of one of those phases of human nature out of which the anchoretic life has sprung. When forty years old, Welby was assailed, in a moment of anger, by a younger brother, with a loaded pistol. It flashed in the pan. 'Thinking of the danger he had escaped, he fell into many deep considerations, on the which he grounded an irrevocable resolution to live alone.' He had wealth and position, and was of a social temper; but the shock he had undergone had made him distrustful and meditative, not malignant nor wretched, and engendered in him a purpose of surpassing tenacity. He had three chambers, one within another, prepared for his solitude; the first for his diet, the second for his lodging, the third for his study. While his food was set on the table by one of his servants, he retired into his sleeping-room; and, while his bed was making, into his study; and so on, until all was clear. 'There he set up his rest, and, in forty-four years, never upon any occasion issued out of those chambers till he was borne thence upon men's shoulders. Neither, in all that time, did any human being--save, on some rare necessity, his ancient maid-servant--look upon his face.' Supplied with the best new books in various languages, he devoted himself unto prayers and reading. He inquired out objects of charity and sent them relief. He would spy from his chamber, by a private prospect into the street, any sick, lame, or weak passing by, and send comforts and money to them. 'His hair, by reason no barber came near him for the space of so many years, was so much overgrown at the time of his death, that he appeared rather like an eremite of the wilderness than an inhabitant of a city.'"

Welby must have possessed the jewel which this incident, related by Izaak Walton in his Angler, discovers to be so indispensable. "I knew a man," he says, "that had health and riches and several houses, all beautiful and ready furnished, and would often trouble himself and family to be removing from one house to another; and, being asked by a friend why he removed so often from one house to another, replied, 'It was to find content in some one of them.' 'Content,' said his friend, 'ever dwells in a meek and quiet soul.'"

"It's no in titles nor in rank;
It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank,
To purchase peace and rest;
It's no in making muckle mair:
It's no in books; it's no in lear,
To make us truly blest:
If happiness hae not her seat
And centre in the breast,
We may be wise, or rich, or great,
But never can be blest:
Nae treasures, nor pleasures,
Could make us happy lang;
The heart aye's the part aye,
That makes us right or wrang."

Out of mud, say the Orientalists, springs the lotus flower; out of clay comes gold and many precious things; out of oysters the pearls; brightest silks, to robe fairest forms, are spun by a worm; bezoar from the bull, musk from the deer, are produced; from a stick is born flame; from the jungle comes sweetest honey. As from sources of little worth come the precious things of earth, even so is it with hearts that hold their fortune within. They need not lofty birth or noble kin. Their victory is recorded. A rain-drop, they say, fell into the sea. "I am lost!" it cried; "what am I in such a sea?" Into the shell of a gaping oyster it fell, and there was formed into the orient pearl which now shines fairest in Britain's diadem. Humility creates the worth it underrates. "By two things," says the author of the Imitation, "a man is lifted up from things earthly, namely, by simplicity and purity. A pure heart penetrateth heaven and hell. Such as every one is inwardly, so he judgeth outwardly. If there be joy in the world, surely a man of a pure heart possesseth it.... Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men; for whether they judge well of thee or ill, thou art not on that account other than thyself. He that careth not to please men, nor feareth to displease them, shall enjoy much peace.... He enjoyeth great tranquillity of heart, that careth neither for the praise nor dispraise of men. If thou consider what thou art in thyself, thou wilt not care what men say of thee. Man looketh on the countenance, but God on the heart. Man considereth the deeds, but God weigheth the intentions." "Will you not be very glad to know," wrote Eugenie de Guerin to her brother, in Paris, "that I have just been spending a pleasant quarter of an hour on the terrace-steps, seated by the side of an old woman, who was singing me a lamentable ballad on an event that occurred long ago at Cahuzac? This came about apropos of a gold cross that has been stolen from the neck of the blessed Virgin. The old woman remembered her grandmother telling her that she had heard in olden times of this same church being the scene of a still more sacrilegious robbery, since it was then the blessed sacrament that was carried off one day when it was left exposed in the empty church. A young girl came to the altar while everybody was busy in the harvest, and, mounting upon it, put the pyx into her apron, and went and placed it under a rose-tree in a wood. The shepherds who discovered it told where it was, and nine priests came in procession to adore the blessed sacrament under the rose-tree, and to carry it back to the church. But for all that, the poor shepherdess was arrested, tried, and condemned to be burned. Just when about to die, she requested to confess, and owned the fact to a priest; but it was not, she said, because of any thievish propensities she took it, but that she wanted to have the blessed sacrament in the forest. 'I thought that the good God would be as satisfied under a rose-tree as on an altar.' At these words an angel descended from heaven to announce her pardon, and to comfort the pious criminal, who was burnt on a stake, of which the rose-tree formed the first fagot." There is a tradition that one night, Gabriel, from his seat in paradise, heard the voice of God sweetly responding to a human heart. The angel said, "Surely this must be an eminent servant of the Most High, whose spirit is dead to lust and lives on high." The angel hastened over land and sea to find this man, but could not find him in the earth or heavens. At last he exclaimed, "O Lord, show me the way to the object of thy love!" God answered, "Turn thy steps to yon village, and in that pagoda thou shalt behold him." The angel sped to the pagoda, and therein found a solitary man kneeling before an idol. Returning, he cried, "O master of the world! hast thou looked with love on a man who invokes an idol in a pagoda?" God said, "I consider not the error of ignorance: this heart, amid its darkness, hath the highest place."

Anaxagoras, whose disciples were Socrates and Pericles and Euripides, in reply to a question, said he believed those to be most happy who seem least to be so; and that we must not look among the rich and great for persons who taste true happiness, but among those who till a small piece of ground, or apply themselves to the sciences, without ambition. "The fairest lives, in my opinion," said Montaigne, "are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model, without miracle, without extravagance." "If some great men," said Mandeville, "had not a superlative pride, and everybody understood the enjoyment of life, who would be a lord chancellor, a prime minister, or a grand pensionary?" There is in existence a precious old album containing the handwriting of many renowned men, such as Luther, Erasmus, Mosheim, and others. The last-mentioned has written, in Latin, the following remarkable words: "Renown is a source of toil and sorrow; obscurity is a source of happiness." "Does he not drink more sweetly that takes his beverage in an earthen vessel," asks Jeremy Taylor, "than he that looks and searches into his golden chalices, for fear of poison, and looks pale at every sudden noise, and sleeps in armor, and trusts nobody, and does not trust God for safety?"

"The world," said Goethe, "could not exist, if it were not so simple. This ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green again."

"Everything has its own limits," says Hazlitt, "a little centre of its own, round which it moves; so that our true wisdom lies in our keeping in our own walk in life, however humble or obscure, and being satisfied if we can succeed in it. The best of us can do no more, and we shall only become ridiculous or unhappy by attempting it. We are ashamed because we are at a loss in things to which we have no pretensions, and try to remedy our mistakes by committing greater. An overweening vanity or self-opinion is, in truth, often at the bottom of this weakness; and we shall be most likely to conquer the one by eradicating the other, or restricting it within due and moderate bounds."

In the Imaginary Conversations, Aspasia asks Pericles: "Is there any station so happy as an uncontested place in a small community, where manners are simple, where wants are few, where respect is the tribute of probity, and love is the guerdon of beneficence?"

"From my tutor," said the good emperor Marcus Aurelius, "I learnt endurance of labor, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander."