Library Notes Part 11

"What a mult.i.tude 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 lat.i.tude, 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d grant a long life; and I have come to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s the Carnival at Venice." The other five kings heard this confession with a n.o.ble compa.s.sion. Each of them gave King Theodore twenty sequins to buy some clothes and s.h.i.+rts.

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 princ.i.p.al 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 l.u.s.tre 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 sh.o.r.e 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trious Madame Recamier, "after forty years of unchallenged queens.h.i.+p 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 sh.o.r.e of the ocean. I go over all the sad and joyous circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sed 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 enn.o.bling 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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. .h.i.therto 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 pa.s.sed away, time pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sociation 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 n.o.bler 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 companions.h.i.+p; 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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 surpa.s.sing 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 G.o.d 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 ill.u.s.tration of one of those phases of human nature out of which the anch.o.r.etic life has sprung. When forty years old, Welby was a.s.sailed, 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 surpa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing by, and send comforts and money to them. 'His hair, by reason no barber came near him for the s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.tles 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 n.o.ble 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 sh.e.l.l of a gaping oyster it fell, and there was formed into the orient pearl which now s.h.i.+nes 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 h.e.l.l. 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 G.o.d on the heart. Man considereth the deeds, but G.o.d 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 ap.r.o.n, 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 G.o.d 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 f.a.got." There is a tradition that one night, Gabriel, from his seat in paradise, heard the voice of G.o.d 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 l.u.s.t 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!" G.o.d answered, "Turn thy steps to yon village, and in that paG.o.da thou shalt behold him." The angel sped to the paG.o.da, 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 paG.o.da?" G.o.d 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 alb.u.m 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 n.o.body, and does not trust G.o.d 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."

"Ah!" exclaimed the Attic Philosopher, "if men but knew in what a small dwelling joy can live, and how little it costs to furnish it!... Does a man drink more when he drinks from a large gla.s.s? From whence comes that universal dread of mediocrity, the fruitful mother of peace and liberty?

Ah! there is the evil which, above every other, it should be the aim of both public and private education to antic.i.p.ate! If that were got rid of, what treasons would be spared, what baseness avoided, what a chain of excess and crime would be forever broken! We award the palm to charity, and to self-sacrifice: but, above all, let us award it to moderation, for it is the great social virtue. Even when it does not create the others, it stands instead of them." Socrates used to say that the man who ate with the greatest appet.i.te had the least need of delicacies; and that he who drank with the greatest appet.i.te was the least inclined to look for a draught which is not at hand; and that those who want fewest things are nearest to the G.o.ds. Milton says that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the G.o.ds, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a golden bowl. "Have you never noticed," said Hiero, "all the mult.i.tudinous contrivances which are set before tyrants, acid, and harsh, and sour; and whatsoever else there can be of the same kind?" "To be sure I have," said Simonides; "and all these things appeared to me to be very contrary to the natural taste of any man." "And do you think,"

said Hiero, "that these dishes are anything else but the fancies of a diseased and vitiated taste; since those who eat with appet.i.te, you well know, have no need of these contrivances and provocatives?" Michel Angelo seldom partook of the enjoyments of the table, and used to say, "However rich I may have been, I have always lived as a poor man." Said Seneca, "He that lives according to nature cannot be poor, and he that exceeds can never have enough." Epicurus said, "I feed sweetly upon bread and water, those sweet and easy provisions of the body, and I defy the pleasures of costly provisions." Cardinal Mancini staying once on a visit to Poussin till it was dark, the artist took the candle in his hand, lighted him down-stairs, and waited upon him to his coach. The prelate was sorry to see him do it himself, and could not help saying, "I very much pity you, Poussin, that you have not one servant." "And I pity you more, my lord," replied Poussin, "that you have so many." "No man needs to flatter," said Jeremy Taylor, "if he can live as nature did intend. He need not swell his accounts, and intricate his spirit with arts of subtlety and contrivance; he can be free from fears, and the chances of the world cannot concern him. All our trouble is from within us; and if a dish of lettuce and a clear fountain can cool all my heats, so that I shall have neither thirst nor pride, l.u.s.t nor revenge, envy nor ambition, I am lodged in the bosom of felicity."

"Prosperity," says Froude, in one of his essays, "is consistent with intense worldliness, intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of human character,--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause,--these have no tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way, the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them. High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchedness of all kinds which forever prevail among mankind,--the short-comings in himself of which he becomes more conscious as he becomes really better,--these things, you may be sure, will prevent a n.o.ble-minded man from ever being particularly happy." "I should rather say," he says in another essay, "that the Scots had been an unusually happy people.

Intelligent industry, the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well, under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born--this through the week, and at the end of it the Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night--the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together, and irradiated with a sacred presence. Happiness!

such happiness as we human creatures are likely to know upon this world will be found there, if anywhere."

"On the Simplon," says a German traveler, "amid the desert of snow and mist, in the vicinity of a refuge, a boy and his little sister were journeying up the mountain by the side of our carriage. Both had on their backs little baskets filled with wood, which they had gathered in the lower mountains, where there is still some vegetation. The boy gave us some specimens of rock crystal and other stone, for which we gave him some small coins. The delight with which he cast stolen glances at his money, as he pa.s.sed by our carriage, made upon me an indelible impression. Never before had I seen such a heavenly expression of felicity. I could not but reflect that G.o.d had placed all sources and capabilities for happiness in the human heart; and that, with respect to happiness, it is perfectly indifferent how and where one dwells."

"A man," says c.u.mberland, "who is gifted with worldly qualities and accommodations is armed with hands, as a s.h.i.+p with grappling-irons, ready to catch hold of, and make himself fast to everything he comes in contact with, and such a man, with all these properties of adhesion, has also the property, like the polypus, of a most miraculous and convenient indivisibility; cut off his hold--nay, cut him how you will, he is still a polypus, whole and entire. Men of this sort still work their way out of their obscurity like c.o.c.kroaches out of the hold of a s.h.i.+p, and crawl into notice, nay, even into kings' palaces, as the frogs did into Pharaoh's; the happy faculty of noting times and seasons, and a lucky prompt.i.tude to avail themselves of moments with address and boldness, are alone such all-sufficient requisites, such marketable stores of worldly knowledge, that, although the minds of those who own them shall be, as to all the liberal sciences, a rasa tabula, yet knowing these things needful to be known, let their difficulties and distresses be what they may, though the storm of adversity threatens to overwhelm them, they are in a life-boat, buoyed up by corks, and cannot sink. These are the stray children turned loose upon the world, whom Fortune, in her charity, takes charge of, and for whose guidance in the by-ways and cross-roads of their pilgrimage she sets up fairy finger-posts, discoverable by those whose eyes are near the ground, but unperceived by such whose looks are raised above it."

"Genial manners are good," says Emerson, "and power of accommodation to any circ.u.mstance; but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness,--whether it be to make baskets, or broad-swords, or ca.n.a.ls, or statues, or songs."

Wordsworth's man-servant, James, was brought up in a work-house, and at nine years of age was turned out of the house with two s.h.i.+llings in his pocket. When without a six-pence, he was picked up by a farmer, who took him into his service on condition that all his clothes should be burnt (they were so filthy); and he was to pay for his new clothes out of his wages of two pounds ten s.h.i.+llings per annum. Here he stayed as long as he was wanted. "I have been so lucky," said James, "that I was never out of a place a day in my life, for I was always taken into service immediately. I never got into a sc.r.a.pe, or was drunk in my life, for I never taste any liquor. So that I have often said, I consider myself as a favorite of fortune!" This is like Goldsmith's cripple in the park, who, remarking upon his appealing wretchedness, said, "'Tis not every man that can be born with a golden spoon in his mouth."

"Arrogance," said Goethe, "is natural to youth. A man believes, in his youth, that the world properly began with him, and that all exists for his sake. In the East, there was a man who, every morning, collected his people about him, and never would go to work till he had commanded the sun to arise. But he was wise enough not to speak his command till the sun of its own accord was ready to appear." "At the outset of life,"

says Hazlitt, "our imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and there is always something to come better than what we see. As in our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in lamb's-wool, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls, and nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what has been!"

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparel'd in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it has been of yore; Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

"The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The suns.h.i.+ne is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath pa.s.sed away a glory from the earth."

"Why," asks Souvestre, "is there so much confidence at first, so much doubt at last? Has, then, the knowledge of life no other end but to make it unfit for happiness? Must we condemn ourselves to ignorance if we would preserve hope? Is the world, and is the individual man, intended, after all, to find rest only in an eternal childhood?"

"If the world does improve on the whole," said Goethe, "yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning." But, "'tis a great advantage of rank," said Pascal, "that a man at eighteen or twenty shall be allowed the same esteem and deference which another purchaseth by his merit at fifty. Here are thirty years gained at a stroke."

"The whole employment of men's lives," said the same thinker, "is to improve their fortunes; and yet the t.i.tle by which they hold all, if traced to its origin, is no more than the pure fancy of the legislators: but their possession is still more precarious than their right, and at the mercy of a thousand accidents: nor are the treasures of the mind better insured; while a fall, or a fit of sickness, may bankrupt the ablest understanding.... Caesar was too old, in my opinion, to amuse himself with projecting the conquest of the world. Such an imagination was excusable in Alexander, a prince full of youth and fire, and not easy to be checked in his hopes. But Caesar ought to have been more grave."

"Knowledge has two extremities, which meet and touch each other," says Pascal, again. "The first of them is pure, natural ignorance, such as attends every man at his birth. The other is the perfection attained by great souls, who, having run through the circle of all that mankind can know, find at length that they know nothing, and are contented to return to that ignorance from which they set out. Ignorance that thus knows itself is a wise and learned ignorance."

"That is ever the difference," said Emerson, "between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual."