e,--but my life has been an
uneventful one. I never met with an adventure, never even had a
hair-breadth escape,--yes, I did, too, have one hair-breadth escape. I
once just grazed matrimony. The truth is, I fell in love, and was
sinking with Falstaff's 'alacrity,' when I was fished out; but somehow I
slipt off the hook--fortunately, however, was left on shore. By the way,
the best way to get out of love is to be drawn out by the matrimonial
hook. One of Holmes' characters wished to change a vowel of the verb _to
love_, and conjugate it--I have forgotten how far. Where two set out to
conjugate together the verb to love in the first person plural, it is
well if they do not, before the honey-moon is over, get to the
present-perfect, indicative. Alas! I have thus far, in the first person
singular, conjugated too many verbs, among them _to enjoy_. As for _to
be_, I have come to the balancing in my mind of the question that so
perplexed Hamlet--'To be, or not to be.' For, with all the natural
cheerfulness of my disposition, I can not help sometimes looking on the
dark side of life. But there is no use in setting down my gloomy
reflections,--all have them. We are all surrounded by an atmosphere of
misery, pressing on us fifteen pounds to the square inch, so evenly and
constantly that we know not its fearful weight. To change the figure.
Have you ever thought how much misery one life _can_ hold in solution?
Each year, as it flows into it, adds to it a heaviness, a weight of woe,
as the rivers add salts to the ocean. I do not refer to the most
unhappy, but to all. Some one says,--

'If singing breath, if echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven.'

If breath to every hidden prayer were given, could it be _singing_
breath? Would it not be a wail monotonous as the dirge of the November
wind over the dead summer, a wail for lost hopes, lost joys, lost loves?
Or the monotony would be varied--as is the wind by fitful gusts--by
shrieks of despair, cries of agony. No, no, there is no use in trying to
modulate our woes,--'we're all wrong,--the _time_ in us is lost.'

'Henceforth I'll bear
Affliction, till it do cry out itself,
"Enough, enough," and die.'

But why talk thus? why mourn over dead hopes, dead joys, dead loves?
'Tis best to bury the dead out of our sight, and from them will spring
many humbler hopes, quieter joys,