Such considerations as these, drawn from the unalterable laws of nature and life, show how short is the sight of those who look upon happiness as the uninterrupted continuance of pleasurable sensations, or would seek it in a ceaseless round of gayety. Far clearer was the vision of Pindar when he exclaimed, with the inspiration of a poet,—“Beneath every true pleasure hides the sense of a past pain.” The dark background of sorrow can alone give full relief to the bright figure of joy. Grief is a part of gladness, and that life is not happy which has no unhappiness. So Browning, with characteristic insight and strength, puts in the mouth of one of his intensest characters,—“Naught is lacking to complete our bliss, but woe.”
These are not mere paradoxes and literary refinements on scientific facts. All who have entered sympathetically into the deep and tender emotions of the human heart have felt and seen this mysterious and inseparable connection.
It is so beautifully set forth in reference to one of the saddest griefs of life by Leigh Hunt, that I must quote his words. They are in his essay on the “Deaths of Little Children.”
“Pain softens into pleasure as the darker hue of the rainbow melts into the brighter.… Made as we are, there are certain pains without which it would be difficult to conceive certain great and overbalancing pleasures. We may conceive it possible for beings to be made entirely happy; but in our composition, something of pain seems to be a necessary ingredient in order that the materials may turn to as fine an account as possible. The loss of children seems to be one of those necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. If none at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or a woman secured; and it will easily be conceived what a world of endearing cares and hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are the only persons who, in one sense, retain it always; and they furnish their neighbors with the same idea. The other children grow up to manhood or to womanhood and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has
arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.
“Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our fancy and our hopes; they are the ever-smiling emblems of joy; the prettiest pages that wait upon imagination; lastly, 'Of these are the Kingdom of Heaven.’”
Something akin to the sweetness of these touching reflections is found in Sir Richard Steele’s essay on “The Death of Friends,” whose stately and gracious style seems ever treading a minuet at the court of good Queen Anne:—
“When we are advanced in years, there is not a more pleasing entertainment than to recollect the many we have parted with that have been dear to us.… It is necessary to revive the old places of grief in our memory, to lead the mind unto that sobriety of thought which poises the heart and makes it beat with due time, without being quickened by desire or retarded by despair from its proper and equal motion.”
Thus it is that sadness is ofttimes a necessary and the best preparative for gladness. The blacker the shadow, the brighter is the light that casts it. In all pleasurable feelings there must be the alternations from exercise to remission and repose; and in proportion as such feelings are keen, will pain take the place of simple exhaustion. When the waves of emotion are but ripples on the surface of life, stirred by the zephyrs of light desires, the remission will be but a passing sense of fatigue; but when the sensitive
heart is shaken to its depths by the mighty winds of passion, then the reaction will be not less profound, and the moments of wild joy will be repaid to the uttermost by periods of dejection and despair. In such temperaments there is danger of the morbid persistence of the period of depression, and ready recourse must be had to diversion and occupation to avoid this considerable peril.