Hello, who seem not to have been happy, for all that the sense of
the infinite, universal, eternal, was loftily throned in their soul.
But it may well be an error to think that he who gives voice to the
multitude's sorrow must himself always be victim to great personal
despair. The horizon of sorrow, surveyed from the height of a
thought that has ceased to be selfish, instinctive, or commonplace,
differs but little from the horizon of happiness when this last is
regarded from the height of a thought of similar nature, but other
in origin. And after all, it matters but little whether the clouds
be golden or gloomy that yonder float over the plain; the traveller
is glad to have reached the eminence whence his eye may at last
repose on illimitable space. The sea is not the less marvellous and
mysterious to us though white sails be not for ever flitting over
its surface; and neither tempest nor day that is radiant and calm is
able to bring enfeeblement unto the life of our soul. Enfeeblement
comes through our dwelling, by night and by day, in the airless room
of our cold, self-satisfied, trivial, ungenerous thoughts, at a time
when the sky all around our abode is reflecting the light of the
ocean.

But there is a difference perhaps between the sage and the thinker.
It may be that sorrow will steal over the thinker as he stands on
the height he has gained; but the sage by his side only smiles--and
this smile is so loyal, so human and natural, that the humblest
creature of all must needs understand, and will gladly welcome it to
him, as it falls like a flower to the foot of the mountain. The
thinker throws open the road "which leads from the seen to the
unseen;" the sage throws open the highway that takes us from that
which we love to-day to that which we yet shall love, and the paths
that ascend from that which has ceased to console to that which, for