And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation of principle, that diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with the absence of the benevolent propensities,—these constitute misery as a state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had 12,000_l._ a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends; very little conscience, not enough, one would have thought, to vex with any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The perpetual kicking against the pricks, the unreasonable _exigéance_ with regard to things, without any high standard with regard to persons,—these made the misery. I can speak of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years. I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that he confounded happiness with pleasure, with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering scorn the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called: he styled this philosophy of happiness, “the philosophy of the frying-pan.” But this was like the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes, something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure—is as sublime a thing as virtue itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of view it seems a perilous mistake to separate them. [Illustration] 6. Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God’s blessed sunshine—_Tristi fummo nel’ aer dolce_; and in some of the ancient Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue. Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and goodness to consist in “a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfaction.” What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant head of Christ in Raphael’s Transfiguration should rather be our ideal of Him who came “to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” [Illustration] 7.