CHAPTER IV.

GLADNESS AND SADNESS.

NATURE, both as the great whole and as the particular wealth, we can scarce forbear repeating, is perpetual minister to us of delight; so likewise, and perhaps for this very reason, occasion of pain; both directly and through supplies which we gain or which we lose. Man, as knit to us through separate persons in nearer affinities, communicates to us higher delight, deeper pain, as we meet kindness and love, or as we suffer from alienation and unkindness. So far we have already gone. There is another step to take. Each person, in and of himself, from the mysterious depths within him, derives an element of joy; this withdrawn, he is left in sorrow. To this topic, in the twofold aspect thus suggested, let us now look.

SECTION I.

GLADNESS.

THIS natural and spontaneous outflow of the life stands in clear relation to two modes of our existence, the body acting upon the mind, and the mind acting within and upon itself.

1. Besides the influence which we feel as pleasure, there is another ministry wherein the body serves the soul. Pleasure seems to suppose the presence of an external object exciting a certain sense, as of gratified appetite. The more interior gladness, whether such pleasure accompanies it or not, belongs to a somewhat different order of experience. It supposes only the healthful and harmonious condition of the body, wherein the vital power, the spontaneous energy, the affections and thoughts, all operate without check: the gladness, which is always at the centre of the soul, is able to flow out, to gush, to leap, it may be wildly, at all events freely and naturally.

The bodily condition of this free joy has been spoken of as healthful. But it is healthful in a different sense from that in which we commonly ascribe health to a man. Such health is sometimes found disjoined even from cheerfulness or content. Some persons of sound, and even vig

orous body, are full of weak and diseased thoughts, dark, gloomy, despondent. Others, of what appears unsound and even feeble frame, are full of strong and vigorous thoughts, bright, gladsome, and sometimes gay, full always of hope. Thus many times sickness, instead of being an occasion of depression, reveals the sweetest and withal the liveliest qualities of our nature. Thus in weakness the spirit is strong; in very pain the heart bursts forth into an unsubdued glee; and often in the last hours, so frequently deemed those of most awful solemnity, the man passes away from all visible relations to the world amidst utterances of triumphant joy or of celestial peace.

What do we learn here? Not that health, because it may be connected with opposite states of mind, is worthless; nor yet that disease is otherwise than undesirable in itself; either of these suppositions would be no less than absurd. But we do learn, that there is a deeper element of health than usually bears the name. There are conditions of body precluding the possibility of good cheer, let the soul itself be pure as it may; just as there are those conditions of body wherein the pure heart can scarce choose but overflow with its inner gladness. These conditions, and their laws, science has as yet but slightly explored. These, neither work

nor sport nor medicine is able to impart. Of these, neither the weight which one can lift, nor the toil which he can go through, nor the exposure to which he can lay himself out and gain strength from it, furnishes any measure. There is a health even of the body which eludes all such tests, and exists without such appliances, and passes almost unquestioned of science. And yet the most common language involves the fact. When we speak of some persons as nervous, of others as phlegmatic, of a third class as sanguine,when we talk so familiarly of the cold-blooded and those of hot blood, of the hot head and the cool head, of the warm heart and the cold heart, and so throughout our speech concerning men, -unconscious as we may be of any meaning but what the words convey through daily use, we still employ phrases which, applied indeed to the mind, indicate secret relations and influences of the body, and, whether correct or incorrect, denote an instinct which has anticipated science, in referring states of feeling and thought to states of the natural constitution.

Here every man must be physician to himself, or rather let Nature do her own work in her own way. When the sole question is, how the body can be brought into the best state for work and for endurance, science may come in and give an

swer. But where the question becomes, how the body can be raised into the health out of which freedom and glad thoughts shall flow from the heart into deed and into word, we have yet to wait for the clear, full answer. The points at which the inner life and the outer touch and penetrate each other, the lines which run between the intellectual sphere and the animal, bounding them, but not separating, opening each to reciprocal and perpetual influence from the other, these and the methods of their interaction are finer and more ethereal than any science has yet uncovered. Only Nature and her secret instincts, felt through the experience of life, instruct us in these mysteries.

But we must heed the teaching. That which is found to disturb the pure, deep gladness of the soul must be avoided. That which is found to make it purer and deeper must be sought.

2. Then, with the body ministering to the soul we have also the soul acting within and upon itself, and so quickening its own free joy. Every one knows something of this. We may take an illustration from the fancy. Suppose some instrument, the organ, for instance, touched by the hands of man, or the Æolian harp, whose strings are swept by the winds, so changed by some mysterious power, that of itself, from some