usual, her arrows fall harmless to earth.

Suffering, sorrow, tears, regrets--these words, that vary so
slightly in meaning, are names that we give to emotions which in no
two men are alike. If we probe to the heart of these words, these
emotions, we find they are only the track that is left by our
faults; and there where these faults were noble (for there are noble
faults as there are mean or trivial virtues) our sorrow will be
nearer akin to veritable happiness than the happiness of those whose
consciousness still is confined within narrowest limits. Would
Carlyle have desired to exchange the magnificent sorrow that flooded
his soul, and blossomed so tenderly there, for the conjugal joys,
superficial and sunless, of his happiest neighbour in Chelsea? And
was not Ernest Renan's grief, when Henriette, his sister, died, more
grateful to the soul than the absence of grief in the thousands of
others who have no love to give to a sister? Shall our pity go forth
to him who, at times, will weep on the shore of an infinite sea, or
to the other who smiles all his life, without cause, alone in his
little room? "Happiness, sorrow"--could we only escape from
ourselves for one instant and taste of the hero's sadness, would
there be many content to return to their own superficial delights?

Do happiness and sorrow, then, only exist in ourselves, and that
even when they seem to come from without? All that surrounds us will
turn to angel or devil, according as our heart may be. Joan of Arc
held communion with saints, Macbeth with witches, and yet were the
voices the same. The destiny whereat we murmur may be other,
perhaps, than we think. She has only the weapons we give her; she is
neither just nor unjust, nor does it lie in her province to deliver
sentence on man. She whom we take to be goddess, is a disguised