to lay aside their
wintry clothing together with their fireside habits, whilst the whole rural
environs of our vast city, the woodlands, and the interminable meadows began
daily to re-echo the glad voices of the young and jovial awaking once again,
like the birds and the flowers, and universal nature, to the luxurious
happiness of this most delightful season.

Happiness do I say? Yes, happiness; happiness to me above all others. For I
also in those days was among the young and the gay; I was healthy; I was
strong; I was prosperous in a worldly sense! I owed no man a shilling;
feared no man's face; shunned no man's presence. I held a respectable
station in society; I was myself, let me venture to say it, respected
generally for my personal qualities, apart from any advantages I might draw
from fortune or inheritance; I had reason to think myself popular amongst
the very slender circle of my acquaintance; and finally, which perhaps was
the crowning grace to all these elements of happiness, I suffered not from
the presence of _ennui_; nor ever feared to suffer: for my temperament was
constitutionally ardent; I had a powerful animal sensibility; and I knew the
one great secret for maintaining its equipoise, viz. by powerful daily
exercise; and thus I lived in the light and presence, or (if I should not be
suspected of seeking rhetorical expressions, I would say)--in one eternal
solstice, of unclouded hope.

These, you will say, were blessings; these were golden elements of felicity.
They were so; and yet, with the single exception of my healthy frame and
firm animal organisation, I feel that I have mentioned hitherto nothing but
what by comparison might be thought of a vulgar quality. All the other
advantages that I have enumerated, had they been yet wanting, might have
been acquired; had they been forfeited, might have been reconquered; had
they been even irretrievably lost, might, by a philosophic effort, have
been dispensed with; compensations might have been found for any of them,
many equivalents, or if not, consolations at least, for their absence. But
now it remains to speak of other blessings too mighty to be valued, not
merely as transcending in rank and dignity all other constituents of
happiness, but for a reason far sadder than that--because, once lost, they
were incapable of restoration, and because not to be dispensed with;
blessings in which 'either we must live or have no life:' lights to the
darkness of our