ification of the senses are dependant for their
exquisiteness on the number and variety of the thoughts which they
evoke. And that joy is the greatest which, while felt to be joy, can
include the thought of death and clothe itself with that crowning
pathos. And in the minds of thoughtful persons every joy does, more or
less, with the crowning pathos clothe itself.

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the
arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place
to-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow. You cannot lay a trap
for it. It will fall into no ambuscade, concert it ever so cunningly.
Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps. Into our
commonplace existence it comes with a surprise, like a pure white swan
from the airy void into the ordinary village lake; and just as the
swan, for no reason that can be discovered, lifts itself on its wings
and betakes itself to the void again, _it_ leaves us, and our sole
possession is its memory. And it is characteristic of pleasure that we
can never recognise it to be pleasure till after it is gone. Happiness
never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse
of its features it disappears. It is a gleam of unreckoned gold. From
the nature of the case, our happiness, such as in its degree it has
been, lives in memory. We have not the voice itself; we have only its
echo. We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.
And while in the very heart and structure of the happy moment there
lurked an obscure consciousness of death, the memory in which past
happiness dwells is always a regretful memory. This is why the tritest
utterance about the past, youth, early love, and the like, has always
about it an indefinable flavour of poetry, which pleases and affects.
In the wake of a ship there is always a melancholy splendour. The
finest set of verses of our modern time describes how the poet gazed on
the "happy autumn fields," and remembered the "days that were no more."
After all, a man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is
he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

In our warm imaginative youth, death is far removed from us, and
attains thereby a certain picturesqueness. The grim thought stands in
the ideal world as a ruin stands in a blooming landscape. The thought
of death sheds a pathetic charm over everything then. The young man
cools himself with a thought of the wi