ns. But will it be less bright on that account?
Will the lamb be saddened in the field? Will the lark be less happy in
the air? The sunshine will draw the daisy from the mound under which I
sleep, as carelessly as she draws the cowslip from the meadow by the
riverside. The seasons have no ruth, no compunction. They care not
for our petty lives. The light falls sweetly on graveyards, and on
brown labourers among the hay-swaths. Were the world depopulated
to-morrow, next spring would break pitilessly bright, flowers would
bloom, fruit-tree boughs wear pink and white; and although there would
be no eye to witness, Summer would not adorn herself with one blossom
the less. It is curious to think how important a creature a man is to
himself. We cannot help thinking that all things exist for our
particular selves. The sun, in whose light a system lives, warms me;
makes the trees grow for me; paints the evening sky in gorgeous colours
for me. The mould I till, produced from the beds of extinct oceans and
the grating of rock and mountain during countless centuries, exists
that I may have muffins to breakfast. Animal life, with its strange
instincts and affections, is to be recognised and cherished,--for does
it not draw my burdens for me, and carry me from place to place, and
yield me comfortable broadcloth, and succulent joints to dinner? I
think it matter of complaint that Nature, like a personal friend to
whom I have done kind services, will not wear crape at my funeral. I
think it cruel that the sun should shine, and birds sing, and I lying
in my grave. People talk of the age of the world! So far as I am
concerned, it began with my consciousness, and will end with my decease.

And yet, this self-consciousness, which so continually besets us, is in
itself a misery and a galling chain. We are never happy till by
imagination we are taken out of the pales and limits of self. We
receive happiness at second hand: the spring of it may be in ourselves,
but we do not know it to be happiness, till, like the sun's light from
the moon, it is reflected on us from an object outside. The admixture
of a foreign element sweetens and unfamiliarises it. Sheridan prepared
his good things in solitude, but he tasted for the first time his
jest's prosperity when it came back to him in illumined faces and a
roar of applause. Your oldest story becomes new when you have a new
auditor. A young man is truth-loving and amiable, but