d
Copperfield" laugh at Mr. Micawber, and his rapid passages from the
depth of despair to the summit of happiness, and back again. But if you
have seen or experienced that morbid condition, you would know that
there is more reason to mourn over it than to laugh at it. There
is acute misery felt now and then; and there is a pervading,
never-departing sense of the hollowness of the morbid mirth. It is but
a very few degrees better than "moody madness, laughing wild, amid
severest woe." By depression of spirits I understand a dejection without
any cause that could be stated, or from causes which in a healthy mind
would produce no such degree of dejection. No doubt, many men can
remember seasons of dejection which was not imaginary, and of anxiety
and misery whose causes were only too real. You can remember, perhaps,
the dark time in which you knew quite well what it was that made it so
dark. Well, better days have come. That sorrowful, wearing time, which
exhausted the springs of life faster than ordinary living would have
done, which aged you in heart and frame before your day, dragged over,
and it is gone. You carried heavy weight, indeed, while it lasted. It
was but poor running you made, poor work you did, with that feeble,
anxious, disappointed, miserable heart. And you would many a time have
been thankful to creep into a quiet grave. Perhaps that season did you
good. Perhaps it was the discipline you needed. Perhaps it took out your
self-conceit, and made you humble. Perhaps it disposed you to feel for
the griefs and cares of others, and made you sympathetic. Perhaps,
looking back now, you can discern the end it served. And now that it has
done its work, and that it only stings you when you look back, let that
time be quite forgotten!

* * * * *

There are men, and very clever men, who do the work of life at a
disadvantage, through _this_, that their mind is a machine fitted for
doing well only one kind of work,--or that their mind is a machine
which, though doing many things well, does some one thing, perhaps a
conspicuous thing, very poorly. You find it hard to give a man credit
for being possessed of sense and talent, if you hear him make a speech
at a public dinner, which speech approaches the idiotic for its
silliness and confusion. And the vulgar mind readily concludes that he
who does one thing extremely ill can do nothing well, and that he who is
ignorant on one point is ignor