r the flow of the blood, that makes the difference between buoyant
cheerfulness and deep depression? I begin to think that almost all
educated people, and especially all whose work is mental rather than
physical, suffer more or less from this indescribable gloom. And
although a certain amount of sentimental sadness may possibly help the
poet, or the imaginative writer, to produce material which may be very
attractive to the young and inexperienced, I suppose it will be admitted
by all that cheerfulness and hopefulness are noble and healthful
stimulants to worthy effort, and that depression of spirits does (so to
speak) cut the sinews with which the average man must do the work of
life. You know how lightly the buoyant heart carries people through
entanglements and labors under which the desponding would break down,
or which they never would face. Yet, in thinking of the commonness of
depressed spirits, even where the mind is otherwise very free from
anything morbid, we should remember that there is a strong temptation to
believe that this depression is more common and more prevalent than it
truly is. Sometimes there is a gloom which overcasts all life, like
that in which James Watt lived and worked, and served his race so
nobly,--like that from which the gentle, amiable poet, James Montgomery,
suffered through his whole career. But in ordinary cases the gloom is
temporary and transient. Even the most depressed are not always so.
Like, we know, suggests like powerfully. If you are placed in some
peculiar conjuncture of circumstances, or if you pass through some
remarkable scene, the present scene or conjuncture will call up before
you, in a way that startles you, something like itself which you had
long forgotten, and which you would never have remembered but for this
touch of some mysterious spring. And accordingly, a man depressed in
spirits thinks that he is always so, or at least fancies that such
depression has given the color to his life in a very much greater
degree than it actually has done so. For this dark season wakens up the
remembrance of many similar dark seasons which in more cheerful days are
quite forgot; and these cheerful days drop out of memory for the time.
Hearing such a man speak, if he speak out his heart to you, you think
him inconsistent, perhaps you think him insincere. You think he is
saying more than he truly feels. It is not so; he feels and believes
it all at the time. But he is taking a one-