that it presides over our daily lives? Not until it has become a thing
of the past; and as for the happiness of anticipation, it is not worth
much when we take into account the vague uncertainty of the issues of
time, and the instability of unborn to-morrows.

In a word then, our pleasure is nothing but a negative sensation while
it lasts; we are conscious that, for the time being, the burdensome
fetters of sorrow are loosened, and our souls expand in a glorious
freedom, the power of fate is temporarily suspended, the pressure is
removed from our spirit which soars about in its native element, like
a captive bird set free, flapping its poor paralysed wings that from
long imprisonment have almost forgotten their use--but pain!

Ah! surely no one questions whether pain is a positive sensation or
not; no one at least whose head has been bowed by adversity until his
lips have touched the bitter waters, and tasted perhaps largely of
their unpleasantness! Pain is vastly more to the human heart than the
absence of pleasure; pain is not merely an emptiness, or void, created
by the flight of more cheerful influences; it has a more definite and
distinct acceptation than this would allow; it has as many dark and
melancholy meanings as there are suffering souls in existence; it has
its phases of youth and maturity, now hopeful, now despairing, either
our enemy or our friend.

It professes to dwell among the children of men with the very
strictest impartiality, for pain is an aristocrat and a pauper; pain
rides in fine carriages, and clothes itself in fine linen; it smiles
and sings as often as it mourns and weeps; pain is learned, and it is
ignorant; it underlies the deepest, tenderest love, and it instigates
the darkest, bitterest hatred; in a word it is a weed which infests