world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of 8000 drops of
laudanum per day (just for the same reason as a French surgeon inoculated
himself lately with cancer, an English one twenty years ago with plague,
and a third, I know not of what nation, with hydrophobia), I (it will be
admitted) must surely know what happiness is, if anybody does. And
therefore I will here lay down an analysis of happiness; and as the most
interesting mode of communicating it, I will give it, not didactically,
but wrapped up and involved in a picture of one evening, as I spent every
evening during the intercalary year when laudanum, though taken daily,
was to me no more than the elixir of pleasure. This done, I shall quit
the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different
one--_the pains of opium_.

Let there be a cottage standing in a valley, eighteen miles from any
town--no spacious valley, but about two miles long by three-quarters of a
mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is that all the
family resident within its circuit will compose, as it were, one larger
household, personally familiar to your eye, and more or less interesting
to your affections. Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3,000
and 4,000 feet high, and the cottage a real cottage, not (as a witty
author has it) "a cottage with a double coach-house;" let it be, in fact
(for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with
flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the
walls and clustering round the windows through all the months of spring,
summer, and autumn--beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with
jasmine. Let it, however, _not_ be spring, nor summer, nor autumn, but
winter in his sternest shape. This is a most important point in the
science of happiness. And I am surprised to see people overlook it, and
think it matter of congratulation that winter is going, or, if coming, is
not likely to be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition