ealth?
Not so. Ducats, pistoles, louis-d'or, have brought no panacea to the
sorrows of Balsamo. Beauty? Nay; for, in the profligate experience of
capitals, the sage is saddened with the knowledge that comeliness, at
best, is but an exquisite hypocrisy. I have striven also, vainly, for
contentment in the luxuries of voluptuous living. The talisman of
Epicurus has evaded my grasp--the glittering bauble![5] The ravishing
ideal JOY, has been to me not as the statue to Pygmalion: I have
grovelled down in adoration at its feet, and have found it the same
immobile, relentless, unresponsive image. Youth is yet mine, but it is a
youth hoary in desolation. Centuries of anguish have flooded through my
bosom, even in the heyday of existence. The tangible and the intangible,
the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, have
been at deadly strife in my conjectures. The present has been to me an
evasion, the future an enigma; the earth a delusion, the heavens a
doubt. Even the pomp of those inexplicable stars is a new agony of
indecision to my recoiling fancy[6]--so impassive in their
unchangeableness, so awful in the quiescence of their eternal grandeur.
Supreme, too, in my bewilderment, remains the problem of their
revolutions--the cause of their impulsion[7] as well as of their
creation. Baffled in my scrutiny of the sublime puzzle which is _domed_
over the globe at nightfall, dizzy with the contemplation of such
abysses of mystery, my thoughts have reverted to this earth, in which
pleasure sparkles but to evaporate. No solace in the investigation of
those infinitudes, which are only fathomable by a system revolting to my
judgment--the system of a theocratic philosophy; no consolation in the
dreamings evoked by the lore of the stupendous skies: my heart throbs
still for the detection and the possession of happiness. Nature has
endowed me with senses--five delicate and susceptible instruments--for
the realisation of bodily delight. Sights of unutterable loveliness,
tones of surpassing melody, perfumes of delicious fragrance, marvellous
sensibilities of touch and palate, afford me so many channels for
enjoyment. Still the insufficiency of the palpable and appreciable is
paramount; still the everlasting dolor interposes: the appetite is
satiated, the aroma palls upon the nostrils, the nerves are affected by
irritability, the harmony merges into dissonance; even the beautiful
becomes so far an abomination that man is