CHAPTER XIV.
OF HAPPY DAYS IN SPRING.
And these were the happy days of the courtship of Phœbe and Arthur. They came with the spring blossoms, opening up a bright new future to both.
Yes, happy days, perfectly happy. Philosophy says there is no perfect happiness. Mr. Williamson would smile with quiet amazement at your simplicity if you held that anybody had been perfectly happy, even for an hour. But then, you know, he had been hit in his early days, and the remembrance of his own transient approach to a sense of happiness may have embittered his later existence.
Arthur Phillips, a year ago, would have entered into an abstract argument with you upon the subject. He would have told you, with Guizot, that the study of art perhaps contained the highest elements of happiness; that, in the abstract, it was altogether unconnected with the struggles and contests of ordinary life. Although he would have told you that Guizot’s charming views about the study of art did not always apply to the practice of it, he would have defended his opinion of the unselfishness of a pure taste for the beautiful in art, and demonstrated to you that it brought into play and had the power of exciting the deepest emotions, gratifying both the nobler and softer parts of our nature,—the imagination and the judgment, love of emotion and power of reflection, the enthusiasm and the critical faculty, the senses and the reason;—but the painter would have sighed as he quoted this enthusiastic commendation of art, and thought how far short all this was from perfect happiness.
To ramble about that old cathedral, to think of that dear, sweet face, was happiness; yet it left so much to long for and regret, that sometimes the pain was greater than the happiness.
But as he sits beside that fair girl in the farmer’s parlour, what does he think of happiness now? The philosopher says perfect happiness was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of man, but that He has given us the power of an exceeding near approach to it. And we do not hesitate to say, that He does give to some mortals a foretaste of that perfect happiness which is to be the undying prize of the future day.
A wise lady, and a duchess, too, has said that our happiness in this world depends on the affection we are enabled to inspire. Let Phœbe and Arthur be judged by this standard, and they are to be envied indeed. To sit hand in hand, to walk and talk with freedom of their love, of the little incidents of past days, to recall their moments of doubt, and look back to times of utter hopelessness, to trace their little acts of sympathy from the first days of their love, to recall that grand festival beneath the cathedral roof, to think of the days when each loved the other in secret and in fear and dread and in solitude! Was not this perfect happiness?
Friend Greybeard, does not the old love break out afresh as you contemplate two lovers like these? Don’t you remember the old dream? If there is a picture in thy brain such as that of which sings the poet whose scrap of rhyme, with an American name at the bottom, has just attracted my attention in the corner of the county newspaper, do not shut it out.
“Upon the budded apple-trees
The robins sing by twos and threes,