Library Notes Part 10

It is narrated that one day Philip III., King of Spain, was standing in one of the balconies of his palace observing a young Spanish student, who was sitting in the sun and reading a book, while he was bursting out into fits of laughter. The farther the student read, the more his gayety increased, until at last he was so violently excited that he let the book fall from his hands, and rolled on the ground in a state of intense hilarity. The king turned to his courtiers and said, "That young man is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote." One of the guards of the palace went to pick up the book and found that his majesty had guessed rightly. Yet Miguel Cervantes, the author of this book which is so amusing, had dragged on the most wretched and melancholy existence. He was groaning and weeping while all Spain was laughing at the numerous adventures of the Knight of La Mancha and the wise sayings of Sancho Panza.

The biographer of Grimaldi speaks of the devouring melancholy which pursued the celebrated clown whenever he was off the stage, or left to his own resources; and it is well known that Liston, whose face was sufficient to set an audience in a good humor, was a confirmed hypochondriac. It is said he used to sit up after midnight to read Young's Night Thoughts, delighting in its monotonous solemnity.

"The gravest nations," says Landor, "have been the wittiest; and in those nations some of the gravest men. In England, Swift and Addison; in Spain, Cervantes. Rabelais and La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men have been graver than Pascal; few have been wittier." Robert Chambers tells in one of his essays of a person residing near London, who could make one's sides ache at any time with his comic songs, yet had so rueful, woe-begone a face that his friends addressed him by the name of Mr. Dismal. Nothing remains of Butler's private history but the record of his miseries; and Swift, we are told, was never known to smile. Burns confessed in one of his letters that his design in seeking society was to fly from const.i.tutional melancholy. "Even in the hour of social mirth," he tells us, "my gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner." The most facetious of all Lamb's letters was written to Barton in a fit of the deepest melancholy.

"The elaboration of humor," said Irving, "is often a very serious task; and we have never witnessed a more perfect picture of mental misery than was once presented to us by a popular dramatic writer whom we found in the agonies of producing a farce which subsequently set the theatre in a roar."

Moliere was a grave and silent man. There is a story told of a lady of distinction who invited him to meet a party, thinking that he would entertain them with his wit; he came, but throughout the evening scarcely opened his lips. At Pezenas they used to show a chair in a barber's shop, where he would sit for hours without speaking a word.

Jerrold was a little ashamed of the immense success of the Caudle Lectures, many of which were written to dictation on a bed of sickness, racked by rheumatism. As social drolleries they set nations laughing. He took their celebrity rather sulkily. He did not like to be talked of as a funny man. His mixture of satire and kindliness reminded one of his friends of those lanes near Beyrout, in which you ride with the p.r.i.c.kly-pear bristling alongside of you, and yet can pluck the grapes which force themselves among it from the fields.

There is an account of a singer and his wife who were to sing a number of humorous couplets at a restaurant in Leipsic. The wife made her appearance there at the appointed hour, but, owing to the unexplained absence of her husband, she was compelled to amuse the visitors by singing couplets alone. While her droll performance was eliciting shouts of laughter, her husband hung himself in the court-yard of the restaurant.

Some one said to Dr. Johnson that it seemed strange that he, who so often delighted his company by his lively conversation, should say he was miserable. "Alas! it is all outside," replied the sage; "I may be cracking my joke and cursing the sun: sun, how I hate thy beams!" "Are we to think Pope was happy," said he, on another occasion, "because he says so in his writings? We see in his writings what he wished the state of his mind to appear. Dr. Young, who pined for preferment, talks with contempt of it in his writings, and affects to despise everything he did not despise." The author of John Gilpin said of himself and his humorous poetry, "Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been when in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, would never have been written at all." Sir Walter Scott, in the height of his ill-fortune, was ever giving vent in his diary or elsewhere to some whimsical outburst or humorous sally, and after an extra gay entry in his journal just before leaving his dingy Edinburgh lodgings for Abbotsford, he follows it up next day with this bit of self-portraiture: "Anybody would think from the fal-de-ral conclusion of my journal of yesterday that I left town in a very good humor. But nature has given me a kind of buoyancy--I know not what to call it--that mingles with my deepest afflictions and most gloomy hours. I have a secret pride--I fancy it will be most truly termed--which impels me to mix with my distress strange s.n.a.t.c.hes of mirth which have no mirth in them."

The Grand Duke of Weimar, entertaining an American author at his table, spoke of Poe, whose poem of The Raven he had never heard of until the evening previous. "The conception is terrible," he said. "Of course the Raven can only symbolize Despair, and he makes it perch upon the bust of Pallas, as if Despair even broods over Wisdom."

The Chronicle of Luneburg, says Heine, "records that during the year 1480 there were whistled and sung throughout all Germany certain songs, which for sweetness and tenderness surpa.s.sed any previously known in German realms. Young and old, and the women in particular, were quite bewitched by these ballads, which might be heard the livelong day. But these songs, so the chronicle goes on to say, were composed by a young priest who was afflicted with leprosy and lived a forlorn, solitary life, secluded from all the world. You are surely aware, gentle reader, what a horrible disease was leprosy during the Middle Ages, and how the wretched beings afflicted with this incurable malady were driven out from all society, and from the abodes of men, and were forbidden to approach any human being. Living corpses, they wandered to and fro, m.u.f.fled from head to foot, a hood drawn over the face, and carrying in the hand a bell, the Lazarus-bell, as it was called, through which they were to give timely warning of their approach, so that every one could avoid their path. The poor priest, whose fame as a lyric poet the chronicle praised so highly, was such a leper; and while all Germany, shouting and jubilant, sang and whistled his songs, he, a wretched outcast, in the desolation of his misery sat sorrowful and alone."

"There have been times in my life," said Goethe, "when I have fallen asleep in tears; but in my dreams the most charming forms have come to console and to cheer me."

After Scott began the Bride of Lammermoor, he had one of his terrible seizures of cramp, yet during his torment he dictated that fine novel; and when he rose from his bed, and the published book was placed in his hands, "he did not," James Ballantyne explicitly a.s.sured Lockhart, "recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained."

Jean Paul wrote a great part of his comic romance (Nicholas Margraf) in an agony of heart-break from the death of his promising son Max. He could not, one of his biographers says, bear the sight of any book his son had touched; and the word philology (the science in which Max excelled) went through his heart like a bolt of ice. He had such wonderful power over himself as to go on with his comic romance while his eyes continually dropped tears. He wept so much in secret that his eyes became impaired, and he trembled for the total loss of sight. Wine, that had previously, after long sustained labor, been a cordial to him, he could not bear to touch; and after employing the morning in writing, he spent the whole afternoon lying on the sofa in his wife's apartment, his head supported by her arm.

Was.h.i.+ngton Irving completed that most extravagantly humorous of all his works--the History of New York--while he was suffering from the death of his sweetheart, Matilda Hoffman, which nearly broke his heart. He says, in a memorandum found amongst his private papers after his death, "She was but about seventeen years old when she died. I cannot tell what a horrid state of mind I was in for a long time. I seemed to care for nothing; the world was a blank to me. I went into the country, but could not bear solitude, yet could not enjoy society. There was a dismal horror continually in my mind, that made me fear to be alone. I had often to get up in the night, and seek the bedroom of my brother, as if the having a human being by me would relieve me from the frightful gloom of my own thoughts.... When I became more calm and collected, I applied myself, by way of occupation, to the finis.h.i.+ng of my work. I brought it to a close, as well as I could, and published it; but the time and circ.u.mstances in which it was produced rendered me almost unable to look upon it with satisfaction. Still it took with the public, and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America.... I seemed to drift about without aim or object, at the mercy of every breeze; my heart wanted anchorage. I was naturally susceptible, and tried to form other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it would continually roam to what it had lost; and whenever there was a pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement, I would sink into dismal dejection. For years I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly."

Heine, for several years preceding his death, was a miserable paralytic.

All that time, it is stated, he lay upon a pile of mattresses, racked by pain and exhausted by sleeplessness, till his body was reduced below all natural dimensions, and his long beard fell over the coverlet like swan's down or a baby's hair. The muscular debility was such that he had to raise the eyelid with his hand when he wished to see the face of any one about him; and thus in darkness, he thought, and listened, and dictated, preserving to the very last his clearness of intellect, his precision of diction, and his invincible humor.

The wretchedness of poor Scarron, at whose jests, burlesques, and buffooneries all France was laughing, may be guessed at from his own description. His form, to use his own words, "had become bent like a Z."

"My legs," he adds, "first made an obtuse angle with my thighs, then a right and at last an acute angle; my thighs made another with my body.

My head is bent upon my chest; my arms are contracted as well as my legs, and my fingers as well as my arms. I am, in truth, a pretty complete abridgment of human misery." His head was too big for his diminutive stature, one eye was set deeper than the other, and his teeth were the color of wood. At the time of his marriage (to the beautiful and gifted Mademoiselle d'Aubigne, afterward Madame de Maintenon, the wife for thirty years of Louis XIV.!) he could only move with freedom his hand, tongue, and eyes. His days were pa.s.sed in a chair with a hood, and so completely the abridgment of man he describes himself, that his wife had to kneel to look in his face. He could not be moved without screaming from pain, nor sleep without taking opium. The epitaph which he wrote on himself is touching from its truth:--

"Tread softly--make no noise To break his slumbers deep; Poor Scarron here enjoys His first calm night of sleep."

Balzac said of him, "I have often met in antiquity with pain that was wise, and with pain that was eloquent; but I never before saw pain joyous, nor found a soul merrily cutting capers in a paralytic frame."

He continued to jest to the last; and seeing the bystanders in tears, he said, "I shall never, my friends, make you weep as much as I have made you laugh."

Many of Hood's most humorous productions were dictated to his wife, while he himself was in bed from distressing and protracted sickness.

His own family was the only one which was not delighted with the Comic Annual, so well thumbed in every house. "We, ourselves," writes his son, "did not enjoy it till the lapse of many years had mercifully softened down some of the sad recollections connected with it." Fun and suffering seemed to be natural to him, and to be constantly helping each other.

When a boy, he drew the figure of a demon with the smoke of a candle on the staircase ceiling near his bedroom door, to frighten his brother.

Unfortunately he forgot that he had done so, and, when he went to bed, succeeded in terrifying himself into fits almost--while his brother had not observed the picture. Joke he would, suffering as he might be. It is recorded of him, that upon a mustard plaster being applied to his attenuated feet, as he lay in the direst extremity, he was heard feebly to remark that there was "very little meat for the mustard." But if his wit was marvelous, so was his pathos--tender beyond comparison. His first child scarcely survived its birth. "In looking over some old papers," says his son, "I found a few tiny curls of golden hair, as soft as the finest silk, wrapped in a yellow and time-worn paper, inscribed in my father's handwriting:--

'Little eyes that scarce did see, Little lips that never smiled; Alas! my little dear dead child, Death is thy father, and not me; I but embraced thee soon as he!'"

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, wis.h.i.+ng 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 refres.h.i.+ng, 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 s.h.i.+p, 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, s.h.i.+ps and all, began to run into my mouth, and so I shut it up. I think I see you being dipped into the sea, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g your eyes up, and putting your nose, like a b.u.t.ton, into your mouth, like a b.u.t.ton-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; f.a.n.n.y has made my tea, and I must drink it before it gets too hot, as we all were last Sunday week. They say the gla.s.s 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 a.s.signable 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 att.i.tudes 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 G.o.d, 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 mult.i.tude 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 t.i.tbottom. 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sembled, 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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 t.i.tbottom 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 s.h.i.+p, and the other out of a third story window,' answered t.i.tbottom. '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 emba.s.sador 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sions 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' advertis.e.m.e.nts 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."