depressing,
just because that happiness was so purely incidental to youth and
health, and did not proceed from any sense of principle, any reserve of
emotion, any self-restraint, any activity of sympathy. I confess that
in my own experience as a schoolmaster the particular phenomenon was
sometimes a depressing thing and sometimes a relief. It was depressing
when one was overshadowed by a fretful anxiety or a real sorrow, because
no appeal to it seemed possible: it had a heartless quality. But again
it was a relief when it distracted one from the pressure of a troubled
thought, as when, in the Idylls of the King, the sorrowful queen
was comforted by the little maiden "who pleased her with a babbling
heedlessness, which often lured her from herself."

One felt that one had no right to let the sense of anxiety overshadow
the natural cheerfulness of boyhood, and then one made the effort to
detach oneself from one's preoccupations, with the result that they
presently weighed less heavily upon the heart.

The blessing would be if one could find in experience a quality of
joy which should be independent of natural high spirits altogether, a
cheerful tranquillity of outlook, which should become almost instinctive
through practice, a mood which one could at all events evoke in such a
way as to serve as a shield and screen to one's own private troubles,
or which at least would prevent one from allowing the shadow of our
discontent from falling over others. But it must be to a certain
extent temperamental. Just as high animal spirits in some people are
irrepressible, and bubble up even under the menace of irreparable
calamity, so gloom of spirit is a very contagious thing, very difficult
to dissimulate. Perhaps the best practical thing for a naturally
melancholy person to try and do, is to treat his own low spirits,
as Charles Lamb did, ironically and humorously; and if he must spin
conversation incessantly, as Dr. Johnson said, out of his own bowels,
to make sure that it is the best thread possible, and of a gossamer
quality.

The temperamental fact upon which the possibility of such a
philosophical cheerfulness is based is after all an ultimate
hopefulness. Some people have a remarkable staying power, a power of
looking through and over present troubles, and consoling themselves with
pleasant visions of futurity. This is commoner with women than with men,
because women derive a greater happiness from the happiness of those
a