over the hypothetical fate of the child one of them might have had if she had been married.  Now, there is a certain melancholy not unbecoming a man; indeed, to be without it is hardly to be human.  Here we do find ourselves, indeed, like the shipwrecked mariner on the isle of Pascal’s apologue; all around us are the unknown seas, all about us are the indomitable and eternal processes of generation and corruption.  “We come like water, and like wind we go.”  Life is, indeed, as the great Persian says—­

   “A moment’s halt, a momentary taste
   Of being from the well beside the waste.”

These just causes of melancholy and of awe have presented themselves to all reflective men at all times.  They deeply affect the thought, so wholesome and so human, of Homer.  They express themselves in that old English pagan’s allegory of the bird that flies from the dark into the warm and lighted hall, and from the hall into the dark again.  Not to be capable of these reflections is to be incapable of tasting the noblest poetry.  Such thoughts actually give zest to our days, and sharpen our enjoyment of that which we have only a brief moment to enjoy.  Such thoughts add their own sweetness and sadness to the song of the nightingale, to the fall of the leaves, to the coming of the spring.  Were we “exempt from eld and age,” this noble melancholy could never be ours, and we, like the ancient classical gods, would be incapable of tears.  What Prometheus says in Mr. Bridge’s poem is true—­

            “Not in heaven,
   Among our easy gods, hath facile time
   A touch so keen to wake such love of life
   As stirs the frail and careful being of Man.”

Such are the benefits of Melancholy, when she is only an occasional guest, and is not pampered or made the object of devotion.  But Melancholy, though an excellent companion for an hour, is the most exacting and depressing of mistresses.  The man who gives himself up to her, who always takes too long views, who broods on the future of this planet when the sun has burned out, is on the high-way to madness.  The odds are that he does not travel all the way.  He remains a self-tormented wretch, highly profitable to his medical man, and a frightful nuisance to his family.  Now, there are, of course, cases in which this melancholy has physical causes.  It may come of indigestion, and then the remedy is known.  Less dining out (indeed, no one will ask the abjectly melancholy man out) and more exercise may be recommended.  The melancholy man had better take to angling; it is a contemplative pastime, but he will find it far from a gloomy one.  The sounds and sights of nature will revive and relieve him, and, if he is only successful, the weight of a few pounds of fish on his back will make him toss off that burden which poor Christian carried out of the City of Destruction.  No man can be melancholy when the south wind blows in spring, when the soft, feathery March-browns flit from the alders and fall in the water, while the surface boils with the heads and tails of trout.