nearthly voice,
this song: "Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_-erable!
Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-r-r, whuz-z: Once I was hap-hap-happy,
but now I'm _mees_-erable!"--Rest, rest, perturbed spirit;--or
indeed, as the good old Doctor said: My dear fellow, it isn't of
the slightest consequence! But no; the perturbed spirit could
not rest; and to the neighbours, fretted, affrighted, or at
least insufferably bored by him, it _was_ of such consequence
that they had to go and examine in his haunted chamber. In his
haunted chamber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an
unfortunate--Imitator of Byron? No, is an unfortunate rusty
Meat-jack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work; and this,
in Scottish dialect, is _its_ Byronian musical Life-philosophy,
sung according to ability!

Truly, I think the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for
his 'happiness,'--pothering, and were it ballot-boxing, poem-
making, or in what way soever fussing and exerting himself,--he
is not the man that will help us to 'get our knaves and dastards
arrested!' No; he rather is on the way to increase the number,
--by at least one unit and _his_ tail! Observe, too, that this is
all a modern affair; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to
these dastard new times. 'Happiness our being's end and aim' is
at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in
the world.

The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking
much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not "I
can't eat!" but "I can't work!" that was the burden of all wise
complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of
a man. That he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a
man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life
is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man
can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--
it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has
been: 'not of the slightest consequence' whether we were happy
as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as
job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and
sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard
labour and rust! But our work,--behold that is not abolished,
that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want
of it remains;--for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and
that is now the sole question with