encolia," illustrated it.
It is plain that the robust female figure which has exercised the
ingenuity of so many commentators is not melancholy either from weakness
of the body or vacancy of the mind. She is strong and she is learned;
yet, though the plumes of her wings are mighty, she sits heavily and
listlessly, brooding amidst the implements of suspended labor, on the
shore of a waveless sea. The truth is that Duerer engraved the melancholy
that he himself only too intimately knew. This is not the dulness of the
ignorant and incapable, whose minds are a blank because they have no
ideas, whose hands are listless for want of an occupation; it is the
sadness of the most learned, the most intelligent, the most industrious;
the weary misery of those who are rich in the attainments of culture,
who have the keys of the chambers of knowledge, and wings to bear them
to the heaven of the ideal. If you counsel this "Melencolia" to work
that she may be merry, she will answer that she knows the uses of labor
and its vanity, and the precise amount of profit that a man hath of all
his labor which he taketh under the sun. All things are full of labor,
she will tell you; and in much wisdom is much grief, and he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

Can we escape this brooding melancholy of the great workers--has any
truly intellectual person escaped it ever? The question can never be
answered with perfect certainty, because we can never quite accurately
know the whole truth about the life of another. I have known several men
of action, almost entirely devoid of intellectual culture, who enjoyed
an unbroken flow of animal energy and were clearly free from the
melancholy of Duerer; but I never intimately knew a really cultivated
person who had not suffered from it more or less, and the greatest
sufferers were the most conscientious thinkers and students. Amongst the
illustrious dead, it may be very safely answered that any poet who has
described it has written from his own experience--a transient experience
it may be, yet his own. When Walter Scott, _a-propos_ of Dryden, spoke
of "the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incident to one
doomed to labor incessantly in the feverish exercise of the
imagination," and of that "sinking of spirit which follows violent
mental exertion," is it not evident that his kindly understanding of
Dryden's case came from the sympathy of a fellow-laborer who knew by his
own experience the g