is silently waiting. The foolishest person
will look grand enough one day. The features are poor now, but the
hottest tears and the most passionate embraces will not seem out of
place _then_. If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course
is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race,
what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out
in death. The passions which agitate, distort, and change, are gone
away forever, and the features settle back into a marble calm, which is
the man's truest image. Then the most affected look sincere, the most
volatile, serious--all noble, more or less. And nature will not be
surprised into disclosures. The man stretched out there may have been
voluble as a swallow, but now--when he could speak to some
purpose--neither pyramid nor sphinx holds a secret more tenaciously.

Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence brightens beauty and
elevates happiness. Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and that
melancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green corrugated leaf
brings out the wan loveliness of the primrose. The spectator enjoys
the beauty, but his knowledge that _it_ is fleeting, and that _he_
fleeting, adds a pathetic something to it; and by that something the
beautiful object and the gazer are alike raised.

Everything is sweetened by risk. The pleasant emotion is mixed and
deepened by a sense of mortality. Those lovers who have never
encountered the possibility of last embraces and farewells are novices
in the passion. Sunset affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simply
because it is a setting sun, and suggests a thousand analogies. A
mother is never happier than when her eyes fill over her sleeping
child, never does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for it
more fervently; and yet there is more in her heart than visible red
cheek and yellow curl; possession and bereavement are strangely mingled
in the exquisite maternal mood, the one heightening the other. All
great joys are serious; and emotion must be measured by its complexity
and the deepness of its reach. A musician may draw pretty notes enough
from a single key, but the richest music is that in which the whole
force of the instrument is employed, in the production of which every
key is vibrating; and, although full of solemn touches and majestic
tones, the final effect may be exuberant and gay. Pleasures which rise
beyond the mere grat