Plague him with flies: though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such charges of vexation on’t,
As it may lose some colour.”
In the words of another of Shakspeare’s dramas, “joy cannot show itself modest enough without a badge of bitterness.” Inter delicias semper aliquid sævi nos strangulat, says the Latin adage; the aliquid sævi answering to the aliquid amari of Lucretius, quod in ipsis floribus angat; or again to the aliquid solliciti of Ovid,
... “Nulla est sincera voluptas;
Sollicitique aliquid lætis intervenit.”
Why, Byron asks himself, in his diary (at Ravenna), why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure, does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a retrospect of the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? Mrs. Browning has penned a suggestive sonnet to which the title is superscribed of Pain in Pleasure:
“A thought lay like a flower upon my heart,
And drew around it other thoughts like bees
For multitude and thirst of sweetnesses,—