at I have wished for or can
wish for: health, riches, domestic peace (being unmarried), a tolerably
good conscience, books--and as much sense as I need to enjoy them. I
experience only one single want, lack only one single pleasure in this
world; but that one is enough to embitter my life and class me with
other unfortunates."

I could not guess what might yet be wanting to such a man under such
conditions, "It cannot be liberty," I said, "for how can a rich merchant
in a free town lack this?"

"No! Heaven save me--I neither would nor could live one single day
without liberty."

"You do not happen to be in love with some cruel or unhappy princess?"

"That is still less the case."

"Ah!--now I have it, no doubt--your soul is consumed with a thirst for
truth, for a satisfactory answer to the many questions which are but
philosophic riddles. You are seeking what so many brave men from
Anaxagoras to Spinoza have sought in vain--the corner-stone of
philosophy, the foundation of the structure of our ideas."

He assured me that in this respect he was quite at ease. "Then, in spite
of your good health, you must be subject to that miserable thing, a cold
in the head?" I said.

"Uno minor--Jove, dives
Liber, honoratus, pulcher rex denique regum,
Praecipue sanus--nisi cum pituita molesta est."

--HORACE.

When he denied this too, I gave up trying to solve the meaning of his
dark words.

O happiness! of all earthly chimeras thou art the most chimerical! I
would rather seek dry figs on the bottom of the sea and fresh ones on
this heath,--I would rather seek liberty, or truth itself, or the
philosopher's stone, than to run after thee, most deceitful of lights,
will-o'-the-wisp of our human life!

I thought that at last I had found a perfectly happy, an enviable man;
and now--behold! though I have not the ten-thousandth part of his
wealth, though I have not the tenth part of his health, though I may not
have a third of his intellect, although I have all the wants which he
has not and the one want under which he suffers, yet I would not change
places with him!

From this moment he was the object of my sincerest pity. But what did
this awful curse prove to be? Listen and tremble!

"Of what use is it all to me?" he said: "coffee, which I love more than
all the wines of this earth and more than all the women of this earth,
coffee which I love madly--coffee is forbidden me!"

Laugh who lists! Inasmuch as