shall say that their mode of enjoyment is not as sensible as ours?
Why assume that a doubled-up body, a contorted, purple face, and a
gaping mouth emitting a series of ear-splitting shrieks point to a
state of more intelligent happiness than a pensive face reposing upon
a little white hand, and a pair of gentle tear-dimmed eyes looking
back through Time's dark avenue upon a fading past?

I am glad when I see Regret walked with as a friend--glad because I
know the saltness has been washed from out the tears, and that the
sting must have been plucked from the beautiful face of Sorrow ere we
dare press her pale lips to ours. Time has laid his healing hand upon
the wound when we can look back upon the pain we once fainted under
and no bitterness or despair rises in our hearts. The burden is no
longer heavy when we have for our past troubles only the same sweet
mingling of pleasure and pity that we feel when old knight-hearted
Colonel Newcome answers "_adsum_" to the great roll-call, or when Tom
and Maggie Tulliver, clasping hands through the mists that have
divided them, go down, locked in each other's arms, beneath the
swollen waters of the Floss.

Talking of poor Tom and Maggie Tulliver brings to my mind a saying of
George Eliot's in connection with this subject of melancholy. She
speaks somewhere of the "sadness of a summer's evening." How
wonderfully true--like everything that came from that wonderful
pen--the observation is! Who has not felt the sorrowful enchantment
of those lingering sunsets? The world belongs to Melancholy then, a
thoughtful deep-eyed maiden who loves not the glare of day. It is not
till "light thickens and the crow wings to the rocky wood" that she
steals forth from her groves. Her palace is in twilight land. It is
there she meets us. At her shadowy gate she takes our hand in hers