your reach. In time, no doubt, a man may grow calm; he may learn to
enjoy the pleasures and the exquisite beauties of the lower
regions--though they, too, are most fully enjoyed when they have a
contrast with beauties of a different, and pleasures of a keener
excitement. When first debarred, at any rate, one feels like a balloon
full of gas, and fixed by immovable ropes to the prosaic ground. It is
pleasant to lie on one's back in a bed of rhododendrons, and look up to
a mountain top peering at one from above a bank of cloud; but it is
pleasantest when one has qualified oneself for repose by climbing the
peak the day before and becoming familiar with its terrors and its
beauties. In time, doubtless, one may get reconciled to anything; one
may settle down to be a caterpillar, even after one has known the
pleasures of being a butterfly; one may become philosophical, and have
one's clothes let out; and even in time, perhaps--though it is almost
too terrible to contemplate--be content with a mule or a carriage, or
that lowest depth to which human beings can sink, and for which the
English language happily affords no name, a _chaise à porteurs:_ and
even in such degradation the memory of better times may be pleasant; for
I doubt much whether it is truth the poet sings--

That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

Certainly, to a philosophical mind, the sentiment is doubtful. For my
part, the fate which has cut me off, if I may use the expression, in the
flower of my youth, and doomed me to be a non-climbing animal in future,
is one which ought to exclude grumbling. I cannot indicate it more
plainly, for I might so make even the grumbling in which I have already
indulged look like a sin. I can only say that there are some very
delightful things in which it is possible to discover an infinitesimal
drop of bitterness, and that the mountaineer who undertakes to cut