Yes, I say happy.

The nature of woman, it is conceded by all men, is a curious, interesting, and perplexing, if not, in respect of positive practical results, a most unsatisfactory study.  But nothing puzzles us so much to comprehend as the fact just alluded to.  The tenderest female constitution will sustain a burden of grief which would crush a robust and iron-nerved man, and drive him to despair and suicide.  A woman rarely succumbs to a calamity; however sudden and overwhelming the initial shock may be, she revives and grows cheerful and happy under it in a way and to a degree marvellous to behold.  What singular secret is there among the psychological mysteries of her nature which is able to account for this phenomenon?—­A gentle, timid girl of sixteen, whom the sight of a spider or a live snake would have frightened into hysterics, I had once an opportunity, on a tour through Italy, to observe, while she took little or no notice of other works of art, would gaze, as if fascinated, at the writhings of Laocooen and his sons in the folds and fangs of the serpents, at the sculptured death of the Gladiator, and even at the ghastly, repulsive pictures of martyrdoms and barbaric mutilations and tortures,—­the hideous monstrosities of a diseased and degraded imagination found in the churches and convents of Rome, which made others turn their backs with a shivering of the bones and a creeping of the flesh.  On expressing surprise at such a singular exhibition of taste, I received this innocent, unpremeditated reply:—­“Why, I don’t like them; the sight of them almost freezes my blood; but—­somehow I do like to look at them, for I always feel better after it!” Now is there not involved in this artless answer a possible explanation of the above-mentioned fact?  Has not woman, hidden somewhere among her other (of course angelic)—­affections, a positive love of sickness, death, sorrow, and suffering, which man does not possess?  Is not the pain they cause, in her case, qualified by actual pleasure?  Do they not act as a stimulus upon her sensitive nervous system, and produce, somehow, a delightfully intoxicated state of the feelings?  Would not this explain her otherwise unaccountable fondness for witnessing the execution of murderers, for the horrible in novels and the deaths and catastrophes in the newspapers, that she has a constitutional relish for such horrid things, and that she enjoys them, not because they are in se productive of pleasure, but just, as is the case with her “crying,” because she feels better after it?  And I think it would be found, if an investigation of the subject were instituted, that a foreknowledge of this inevitable result, derived from intuition or experience, is the agent which breaks up the clouds of her sorrow:  so that, while the grief of a man stricken down by misfortune is an equinoctial storm, dark and dismal, which lasts for weeks and months, the grief of woman is a succession of refreshing April showers, each of brief duration, and the spaces between them filled with sunshine and rainbows.