nt temperament is more
common among Irishmen than among Englishmen. Yet it co-exists in the
national character with a strong vein of very genuine melancholy, and it
is often accompanied by keen sensitiveness to suffering. This
combination is a very common one. Every one who has often stood by a
deathbed knows how frequently it will be found that the mourner who is
utterly prostrated by grief, and whose tears flow in torrents, casts off
her grief much more completely and much sooner than one whose tears
refuse to flow and who never for a moment loses her self-command.

But though natural temperament enables one man to do without effort what
another man with the utmost effort fails to accomplish, there are some
available remedies that can palliate the disease. Society, travel and
other amusements can do something, and such words as 'diversion' and
'distraction' embalm the truth that the chief virtue of many pleasures
is to divert or distract our minds from painful thoughts. Pascal
considered this a sign of the misery and the baseness of our nature, and
he describes as a deplorable spectacle a man who rose from his bed
weighed down with anxiety and grave sorrow, and who could for a time
forget it all in the passionate excitement of the chase. But, in truth,
the possession of such a power--weak and transient though it be--is one
of the great alleviations of the lot of man. Religion, with its powerful
motives and its wide range of consolatory and soothing thoughts and
images, has much power in this sphere when it does not take a morbid
form and intensify instead of alleviating sorrow; and the steady
exercise of the will gives us some real and increasing, though
imperfect, control over the current of our feelings as well as of our
ideas.

Often the power of dreaming comes to our aid. When we cannot turn from
some painfully pressing thought to serious thinking of another kind, we
can give the reins to our imaginations and soon lose ourselves in ideal
scenes. There are men who live so habitually in a world of imagination
that it becomes to them a second life, and their strongest temptations
and their keenest pleasures belong to it. To them 'common life seems
tapestried with dreams.' Not unfrequently they derive a pleasure from
imagined or remembered enjoyments which the realities themselves would
fail to give. They select in imagination certain aspects or portions,
throw others into the shade, intensify or attenuate impression