a single
breath!"

"Is not that too refined a sentiment? Custom surely blunts us to every
chance, every danger, that may happen to us hourly. Were the avalanche
over you for a day,--I grant your state of torture,--but had an
avalanche rested over you for years, and not yet fallen, you would
forget that it could ever fall; you would eat, sleep, and make love, as
if it were not!"

"Ha! my Lord, you say well--you say well," said Aram, with a marked
change of countenance; and, quickening his pace, he joined Lester's
side, and the thread of the previous conversation was broken off.

The Earl afterwards, in walking through the gardens (an excursion which
he proposed himself, for he was somewhat of an horticulturist), took an
opportunity to renew the subject.

"You will pardon me," said he, "but I cannot convince myself that man
would be happier were he without emotions; and that to enjoy life he
should be solely dependant on himself!"

"Yet it seems to me," said Aram, "a truth easy of proof; if we love,
we place our happiness in others. The moment we place our happiness in
others, comes uncertainty, but uncertainty is the bane of happiness.
Children are the source of anxiety to their parents;--his mistress to
the lover. Change, accident, death, all menace us in each person whom we
regard. Every new tie opens new channels by which grief can invade us;
but, you will say, by which joy also can flow in;--granted! But in
human life is there not more grief than joy? What is it that renders the
balance even? What makes the staple of our happiness,--endearing to us
the life at which we should otherwise repine? It is the mere passive,
yet stirring, consciousness of life itself!--of the sun and the air of
the physical being; but this consciousness every emotion disturbs. Yet
could you add to its tranquillity an excitement that never exhausts
itself,--that becomes refreshed, not sated, with every new possession,
then you would obtain happiness. There is only one excitement of this
divine order,--that of intellectual culture. Behold now my theory!
Examine it--it contains no flaw. But if," renewed Aram, after a pause,
"a man is subject to fate solely in himself, not in others, he soon
hardens his mind against all fear, and prepares it for all events.
A little philosophy enables him to bear bodily pain, or the common
infirmities of flesh: by a philosophy somewhat deeper, he can conquer
the ordinary reverses of fortune, the dread of s