nourished on what it possesses, though it possess all it
ever desired.

We often see men who are strong and morally prudent whom happiness yet
overcomes. Not finding therein all they sought, they do not defend it,
or cling to it, with the energy needful in life. We must have already
acquired some not inconsiderable wisdom to be undismayed at perceiving
that happiness too has its sorrow, and to be not induced by this sorrow
to think that ours cannot be the veritable happiness. The most precious
gift that happiness brings is the knowledge that springs up within us
that it is not a thing of mere ecstasy, but a thing that bids us
reflect. It becomes far less rare, far less inaccessible, from the
moment we know that its greatest achievement is to give to the soul
that is able to prize it an increase of consciousness, which the soul
could elsewhere never have found. To know what happiness means is of
far more importance to the soul of man than to enjoy it. To be able
long to love happiness great wisdom needs must be ours; but a wisdom
still greater for us to perceive, as we lie in the bosom of cloudless
joy, that the fixed and stable part of that joy is found in the force
which, deep down in our consciousness, could render us happy still
though misfortune wrapped us around. Do not believe you are happy till
you have been led by your happiness up to the heights whence itself
disappears from your gaze, but leaving you still, unimpaired, the
desire to live.

58. There are some profound thinkers, such as Pascal, Schopenhauer,
Hello, who seem not to have been happy, for all that the sense of the
infinite, universal, eternal, was loftily throned in their soul. But it
may well be an error to think that he who gives voice to the
multitude's sorrow must himself always be victim to great personal
despair. The horizon of sorrow, surveyed from the height of a thought
that has ceased to be selfish, instinctive, or commonplace, differs but
little from the horizon of happiness when this last is regarded from
the height of a thought of similar nature, but other in origin. And
after all, it matters but little whether the clouds be golden or gloomy
that yonder float over the plain; the traveller is glad to have reached
the eminence whence his eye may at last repose on illimitable space.
The sea is not the less marvellous and mysterious to us though white
sails be not for ever flitting over its surface; and neither tempest
nor day that is ra