The delicate muse of Samuel Fletcher found—
"Nothing's so dainty sweet, as lovely melancholy,"
and Shakespeare's depressing lines on the value of life are familiar to every schoolboy.
Dryden wrote,—
"When I consider life, 't is all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit,
Trust on and think to-morrow will repay;
To-morrow's falser than the former day."
All of which was afterwards summed up in the well-known line,—
"Man never is but always to be blessed,"
while Thomson noted—
... "all the thousand, nameless ills
That one incessant struggle render life."
Keats, and especially Byron, wrote stanza after stanza of enervating sadness. Moore's dear gazelle is nowadays a familiar comparison. Shelley's tremulous sensibility forbade his finding any charm in life, and we none of us need to be reminded that Poe's soul was sorrow-laden.