the conditions of ideal happiness, yet go near enough to
that end to permit in after days of our imagining that they did so. I
say to most of us, but in doing so I allude chiefly to those classes
commonly known as the "upper," by which is understood those who have
enough bread to put into their mouths and clothes to warm them; those,
too, who are not the present subjects of remorseless and hideous
ailments, who are not daily agonised by the sight of their famished
offspring; who are not doomed to beat out their lives against the
madhouse bars, or to see their hearts' beloved and their most
cherished hope wither towards that cold space from whence no message
comes. For such unfortunates, and for their million-numbered kin upon
the globe--the victims of war, famine, slave trade, oppression, usury,
over-population, and the curse of competition, the rays of light must
be few indeed; few and far between, only just enough to save them from
utter hopelessness. And even to the favoured ones, the well warmed and
well fed, who are to a great extent lifted by fortune or by their
native strength and wit above the degradations of the world, this
light of happiness is but as the gleam of stars, uncertain, fitful,
and continually lost in clouds. Only the utterly selfish or the
utterly ignorant can be happy with the happiness of savages or
children, however prosperous their own affairs, for to the rest, to
those who think and have hearts to feel, and imagination to realise,
and a redeeming human sympathy to be touched, the mere weight of the
world's misery pressing round them like an atmosphere, the mere echoes
of the groans of the dying and the cries of the children are
sufficient, and more than sufficient, to dull, aye, to destroy the
promise of their joys. But, even to this finer sort there do come rare
periods of almost complete happiness--little summers in the
tempestuous climate of our years, green-fringed wells of water in our
desert, pure northern lights breaking in upon our gloom. And strange
as it may seem, these breadths of happy days, when the old questions
cease to torment, and a man can trust in Providence and without one
qualifying thought bless the day that he was born, are very frequently
connected with the passion which is known as love; that mysterious
symbol of our double nature, that strange tree of life which, with its
roots sucking their strength from the dust-heap of humanity, yet
springs aloft above our level a