Are like to tedious bells, that ring alike
Marriage or death.”
Rather than have her uniformly saccharine and smiling, Ben Jonson’s Curius avowedly would have his mistress “angry sometimes, to sweeten off the rest of her behaviour.”
Sir Walter Scott, in one page of his Diary, noting the break-up of a hilarious group of guests at Abbotsford, adds the avowal, “I am not sorry, being one of those whom too much mirth always inclines to sadness.” Even the bright extremes of joy, as Thomas Hood the elder words it, bring on conclusions of disgust:—
“There is no music in the life
That sounds with idiot laughter solely;
There’s not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chord in melancholy.”
Leigh Hunt tenderly tells one of his grandchildren how, when he was a child, and in excessive spirits, his dear mother would sometimes say to him, “Leigh, come and sit down here by me, and let us try to think a little.” Better that than riant sans cesse, even for a child. When I was a child, says the apostle, I thought as a child. Thinking was not out of the question even then, though it might, and by comparison with the man’s it must, be childish thinking. For children as for men, a time to laugh and a time to weep. True, there are differences of gifts and temperaments:—