"Medio de fonte leporum,
Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis fioribus angat."

["From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is
bitter, which even in flowers destroys."--Lucretius, iv. 1130.]

Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it;
would you not say that it is dying of pain? Nay, when we frame the image
of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful
epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness,
'morbidezza': a great testimony of their consanguinity and
consubstantiality. The most profound joy has more of severity than
gaiety, in it. The highest and fullest contentment offers more of the
grave than of the merry:

"Ipsa felicitas, se nisi temperat, premit."

["Even felicity, unless it moderate itself, oppresses?"
--Seneca, Ep. 74.]

Pleasure chews and grinds us; according to the old Greek verse, which
says that the gods sell us all the goods they give us; that is to say,
that they give us nothing pure and perfect, and that we do not purchase
but at the price of some evil.

Labour and pleasure, very unlike in nature, associate, nevertheless,
by I know not what natural conjunction. Socrates says, that some god
tried to mix in one mass and to confound pain and pleasure, but not being
able to do it; he bethought him at least to couple them by the tail.
Metrodorus said, that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure. I