it is easy.  If you live among those who daily call blessing on life, it shall not be long ere you will call blessing on yours.  Smiles are as catching as tears; and periods men have termed happy, were periods when there existed some who knew of their happiness.  Happiness rarely is absent; it is we that know not of its presence.  The greatest felicity avails us nothing if we know not that we are happy; there is more joy in the smallest delight whereof we are conscious, than in the approach of the mightiest happiness that enters not into our soul.  There are only too many who think that what they have cannot be happiness; and therefore is it the duty of such as are happy, to prove to the others that they only possess what each man possesses deep down in the depths of his heart.  To be happy is only to have freed one’s soul from the unrest of happiness.  It were well if, from time to time, there should come to us one to whom fortune had granted a dazzling, superhuman felicity, that all men regarded with envy; and if he were very simply to say to us, “All is mine that you pray for each day:  I have riches, and youth, and health; I have glory, and power, and love; and if to-day I am truly able to call myself happy, it is not on account of the gifts that fortune has deigned to accord me, but because I have learned from these gifts to fix my eyes far above happiness.  If my marvellous travels and victories, my strength and my love, have brought me the peace and the gladness I sought, it is only because they have taught me that it is not in them that the veritable gladness and peace can be found.  It was in myself they existed, before all these triumphs; and still in myself are they now, after all my achievement; and I know full well that had but a little more wisdom been mine, I might have enjoyed all I now enjoy without the aid of so much good fortune.  I know that today I am happier still than I was yesterday, because I have learned at last that I stand in no need of good fortune in order to free my soul, to bring peace to my thoughts, to enlighten my heart.”

53.  Of this the sage is fully aware, though no superhuman happiness may have descended upon him.  The upright man knows it too, though he be less wise than the sage, and his consciousness less fully developed; for an act of goodness or justice brings with it a kind of inarticulate consciousness that often becomes more effective, more faithful, more loving, than the consciousness that springs into being from the very deepest thought.  Acts of this nature bring, above all, a special knowledge of happiness.  Strive as we may, our loftiest thoughts are always uncertain, unstable; but the light of a goodly deed shines steadily on, and is lasting.  There are times when deep thought is no more than merely fictitious consciousness; but an act of charity, the heroic duty fulfilled—­these are true consciousness; in other words, happiness in action.  The happiness of Marcus Aurelius, who condones a mortal affront; of Washington, giving