inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.  The passions which agitate, distort, and change, are gone away forever, and the features settle back into a marble calm, which is the man’s truest image.  Then the most affected look sincere, the most volatile, serious—­all noble, more or less.  And nature will not be surprised into disclosures.  The man stretched out there may have been voluble as a swallow, but now—­when he could speak to some purpose—­neither pyramid nor sphinx holds a secret more tenaciously.

Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence brightens beauty and elevates happiness.  Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and that melancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green corrugated leaf brings out the wan loveliness of the primrose.  The spectator enjoys the beauty, but his knowledge that it is fleeting, and that he fleeting, adds a pathetic something to it; and by that something the beautiful object and the gazer are alike raised.

Everything is sweetened by risk.  The pleasant emotion is mixed and deepened by a sense of mortality.  Those lovers who have never encountered the possibility of last embraces and farewells are novices in the passion.  Sunset affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simply because it is a setting sun, and suggests a thousand analogies.  A mother is never happier than when her eyes fill over her sleeping child, never does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for it more fervently; and yet there is more in her heart than visible red cheek and yellow curl; possession and bereavement are strangely mingled in the exquisite maternal mood, the one heightening the other.  All great joys are serious; and emotion must be measured by its complexity and the deepness of its reach.  A musician may draw pretty notes enough from a single key, but the richest music is that in which the whole force of the instrument is employed, in the production of which every key is vibrating; and, although full of solemn touches and majestic tones, the final effect may be exuberant and gay.  Pleasures which rise beyond the mere gratification of the senses are dependant for their exquisiteness on the number and variety of the thoughts which they evoke.  And that joy is the greatest which, while felt to be joy, can include the thought of death and clothe itself with that crowning pathos.  And in the minds of thoughtful persons every joy does, more or less, with the crowning pathos clothe itself.

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure.  If we find it in one place to-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow.  You cannot lay a trap for it.  It will fall into no ambuscade, concert it ever so cunningly.  Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps.  Into our commonplace existence it comes with a surprise, like a pure white swan from the airy void into the ordinary