ble. Byron speaks the _truth_ in this matter. Byron's
large audience indicates how true it is felt to be.

'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou
art happy or not! Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all Tomorrows
become Yesterdays; and then there is no question whatever of the
'happiness,' but quite another question. Nay, thou hast such a sacred
pity left at least for thyself, thy very pains, once gone over into
Yesterday, become joys to thee. Besides, thou knowest not what
heavenly blessedness and indispensable sanative virtue was in them;
thou shalt only know it after many days, when thou art wiser!--A
benevolent old Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen
sick by gourmandising, whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's
judgment, been examining. The foolish Patient still at intervals
continued to break in on our discourse, which rather promised to take
a philosophic turn: "But I have lost my appetite," said he,
objurgatively, with a tone of irritated pathos; "I have no appetite; I
can't eat!"--"My dear fellow," answered the Doctor in mildest tone,
"it isn't of the slightest consequence;"--and continued his
philosophical discoursings with us!

Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish iron
Misanthrope? The inmates of some town-mansion, in those Northern
parts, were thrown into the fearfulest alarm by indubitable symptoms
of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or perhaps even the
partition-wall! Ever at a certain hour, with preternatural gnarring,
growling and screeching, which attended as running bass, there began,
in a horrid, semi-articulate, unearthly voice, this song: "Once I was
hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_erable! Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-r-r,
whuz-z: Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_erable!"--Rest,
rest, perturbed spirit;--or indeed, as the good old Doctor said: My
dear fellow, it isn't of the slightest consequence! But no; the
perturbed spirit could not rest; and to the neighbours, fretted,
affrighted, or at least insufferably bored by him, it _was_ of such
consequence that they had to go and examine in his haunted chamber.
In his haunted chamber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an
unfortunate--Imitator of Byron? No, is an unfortunate rusty Meat-jack,
gnarring and creaking with rust and work; and this, in Scottish
dialect, is _its_ Byronian musical Life-philosophy, sung according to
ability!

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