“passed in madd’ning pain life’s feverish dream,
While rays of genius only served to show
The thick’ning horror, and exalt his woe;”
when we remember the gloomy setting of the brilliant sun of Scott, during the period of his apoplectic tendency, when his letter “filled the minds of his publishers with dismay,” and he sunk into the delusive hope that his debts were liquidated to the full; when we are told that Ariosto was never seen to laugh, and rarely to smile; that Rousseau was ever restless, and on the verge of mania; when we reflect on the premature decay of unhappy White —
“When science self destroyed her fav’rite son;”
on the painful conflicts of Byron, when his dark hour was on him; on Chatterton, “the sleepless boy who perish’d in his pride:” are incited, almost unconsciously to echo the apostrophe of Wordsworth: —
“We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.”
Ida. The laurel, then, contains more poison than that of prussic acid in its leaf. The perils of romance are not ever in these extremes; yet the mere indulgence of poetic thoughts may so raise the beau-ideal of beauty in the sensitive and youthful mind, as to unfit it for the common duties of life. Like Narcissus, the heart perishes for love of its own shadow. It becomes so acutely sensitive, as to “die of a rose in aromatic pain:” or like the Sybarite, it cannot sleep, because a crumpled rose-leaf lay beneath the pillow.
I have often thought that the secret of happiness may lie in this precept: “Take the good of life as it is, a divine gift, and not an agreeable deception;” when evil is in your path, search its cause, analyze its nature, and if you discover not that you have yourself to thank for it, at least you may prove that the evil itself is made up of mere trifles, and thus you will learn to be resigned.