IS REMEMBERING HAPPIER THINGS." 263 Present, the history of that Scottish iron misanthrope? how the inmates of some town mansion, in those northern parts, were thrown into the fearfullest alarm by indubitable symptoms of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or perhaps even the partition-wall; for, ever at a certain hour, with preternatural gnarring, growling, and screeching, which attended as running bass, there began in a horrid, semi-articulate, unearthly voice, this song: "Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm meeserable! Clack, clack, clack, gnarr-r-r, whuz-z: Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm mees-erable !" The perturbed spirit in question being an unfortunate rusty meat-jack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work; and this, in Scottish dialect, is said to be its Byronian musical Life-philosophy, sung according to ability. In the Induction to Sackville Lord Buckhurst's Mirror for Magistrates, we have a picture of Old Age, who all for nought his wretched mind torments "with sweete remembrance of his pleasures past." The declaration that "to have been happy is the excess of misery," is enforced in the old Hebrew drama, Migdal Oz-one of the speakers in which is made to exclaim : "When I recall the present time's great grief, Baptista, in Beaumont and Fletcher's Fair Maid of the Inn, speaks of a remembered rapture as involving in the remembrance "little less than ever captive suffered." He tells Mariana, 66 To have been happy, Madam, George Wither, after enumerating some of the delights of poetical reminiscence, sighs to think that "of all those pleasures past, nothing now remains at last "But Remembrance, poor relief, That more makes than mends my grief." Though Montreal in the romance professes to have not yet survived all his youth, yet somehow or other the strains that once pleased his fancy now go too directly to his heart, and so, though he still welcomes jongleur and minstrel, he bids them sing their newest conceits: he cannot wish ever again to hear the poetry he heard when he was young. 66 O! then the longest summer's day Seemed too, too much in haste; Too exquisite to last. Of joys departed, 'twas happiness Not to return, how painful the remembrance!” So muses Robert Blair, beside the Grave. And in a fellowfeeling Goldsmith taxes Memory with unkindness,—calls her fond deceiver, still importunate and vain, to former joys recurring ever, and turning all the past to pain: 66 'Thou, like the world, th' oppress'd oppressing, The pensée is pensive Henry Mackenzie's, that they who have never known prosperity, can hardly be said to be unhappy; it is from the remembrance of joys we have lost, that the arrows of affliction are pointed. Must we then, the query suggests itself, tremble in the possession of present pleasures, for fear of their imbittering futurity? or does Heaven thus teach us that sort of enjoyment of which the remembrance is immortal? Does it point out those as the happy who can look back on their past life, not as the chronicle of pleasure, but as the record of virtue ? To the fallen archangel "the happy place," as Milton puts it, imparts no happiness, no joy; "rather inflames thy torment; representing lost bliss, to thee no more communicable,”—so that he is never more in hell than when in heaven. Young "strays (wretched rover !) o'er the pleasing past; in quest of wretchedness perversely strays; and finds all desert now; and meets the ghosts of his departed joys, a numerous train!" His Complaint runs-(with rolling r's), Byron sings that "Past pleasure doubles present pain, to sorrow adds regret." Keats can envy in a drear-nighted December the too happy, happy tree, whose branches ne'er remember their green felicity; and the too happy, happy brook, whose bubblings ne'er remember Apollo's summer look: "Ah! would 'twere so with many A gentle girl and boy! To know the change and feel it, Nor numbed sense to steal it, But something very much like it has been said in rhyme by rhymesters of all dimensions, as these pages from a parallelpassage book go to prove. Wordsworth has this simile in one of his sonnets : "So joys, remembered without wish or will, Hood says of the Moon, in his Ode to Melancholy, "For so it is, with spent delights She taunts men's brains, and makes them mad." Tears from the depth of some divine despair, says Mr. Tennyson, rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, "in looking on the happy Autumn-fields, and thinking of the days that are no more"-so sad, so strange, the days that are no more; deep as first love, and wild with all regret: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more." Landor's Pericles begins a letter to Alcibiades with the reflection, that the remembrance of past days that were happy, increases the gloominess of those that are not, and intercepts the benefit of those that would be. Lamartine describes the captive Dauphin in the Temple as avoiding, with a tact beyond his years, any recurrence to the happy days of family greatness, as if he had guessed that the memory of bygone happiness gives a bitterness to present degradation. And yet Paganism had something to say for that fixed article in its creed, that to have seen some happy days is a solace for all time; that there is a permanent fund of consolation in the reflection, by those in sorrow, that they have had a share in the common enjoyments of this chequered life. M. Guizot emphatically avows in his Memoirs that he does not agree with Dante in the famous passage, for he thinks, on the contrary, that the reflection of a light upon the places it no longer illuminates is a precious enjoyment; and when Heaven and time have availed somewhat to quiet the soul in its rebellion against calamity, it pauses and gratifies itself in contemplating, through the haze of the past, the blessings and advantages it has had to give up. One of our foremost masters of fiction says, that to remember happiness which cannot be restored is pain, but of a softened kind: our recollections are mingled with much to be deplored; but in the most chequered life there are, he contends, so many little rays of sunshine to look back upon, that he cannot believe that any mortal (unless he had put himself without the pale of hope) would deliberately drain a goblet of the waters of Lethe, if he had it in his power. Says Nicusa to Sebastian in The Sea-Voyage, in deprecation of his despairing tone, "Oh, Uncle, yet a little memory Of what we were, 'twill be a little comfort In our calamities; When we were seated in our blessed homes, How happy in our kindreds, all our fortunes." Count Basil, in Miss Baillie's tragedy, is content to have NESSUN MAGGIOR DOLORE ?" 267 loved as he has done, though all that remains to him of life be pain and misery: "Pain! Were it not the easing of all pain, Like silv'ry moon-beams on the 'nighted deep, And Alfred de Musset couches his lance full tilt against Dante's dictum as flat heresy,-thus apostrophizing the great poet, and denying point-blank the creed of nessun maggior dolore: "Dante, pourquoi dis-tu qu'il n'est pire misère Qu'un souvenir heureux dans les jours de douleur ? Cette offense au malheur? "En est-il donc moins vrai que la lumière existe, "Non, par ce pur flambeau dont la splendeur m'éclaire, MORDECAI: UNBENDING BEFORE UPSTART H ESTHER iii. 2. AMAN being advanced by King Ahasuerus, and set above all the princes that were with him, all the king's servants that were in the king's gate duly bowed, and reverenced, or did their reverences to (assiduously made their obeisances to), the promoted Agagite. "But Mordecai bowed not, nor did him reverence." Insomuch that the king's servants remonstrated with the sturdy stiff-backed Hebrew, asking how he dared transgress the king's commandment. As for Haman |