h a kiss."
GOETHE.

The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with
asking much about was happiness enough to get his work done.
Not "I can't eat!" but "I can't work!" that was the burden of
all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one
unhappiness of a man. That he cannot work; that he cannot get
his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing
swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and the night
cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our
happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished; vanished,
clean gone; a thing that has been: not of the slightest
consequence whether we were as happy as eupeptic Curtis, as
the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds,
as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart.
But our work,--behold, that is not abolished, that has not
vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it
remains; for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that
is now the sole question with us forevermore.--CARLYLE.

Among the powers in man which suffer by this too intense life
of the _social_ instincts, none suffers more than the power of
dreaming. Let no man think this a trifle. The machinery for
dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for
nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of
darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates
with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connection with
the heart, the eye, and the ear, composes the magnificent
apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a
human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below
all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind.--DE QUINCEY.

Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.