concerned, it began with my consciousness, and will end with my decease. And yet, this self-consciousness, which so continually besets us, is in itself a misery and a galling chain. We are never happy till by imagination we are taken out of the pales and limits of self. We receive happiness at second hand: the spring of it may be in ourselves, but we do not know it to be happiness, till, like the sun's light from the moon, it is reflected on us from an object outside. The admixture of a foreign element sweetens and unfamiliarises it. Sheridan prepared his good things in solitude, but he tasted for the first time his jest's prosperity when it came back to him in illumined faces and a roar of applause. Your oldest story becomes new when you have a new auditor. A young man is truth-loving and amiable, but it is only when these fair qualities shine upon him from a girl's face that he is smitten by transport--only then is he truly happy. In that junction of hearts, in that ecstasy of mutual admiration and delight, the finest epithalamium ever writ by poet is hardly worthy of the occasion. The countryman purchases oranges at a fair for his little ones; and when he brings them home in the evening, and watches his chubby urchins, sitting up among the bed-clothes, peel and devour the fruit, he is for the time-being richer than if he drew the rental of the orange-groves of Seville. To eat an orange himself is nothing; to see _them_ eat it is a pleasure worth the price of the fruit a thousand times over. There is no happiness in the world in which love does not enter; and love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition. Apart from others no man can make his happiness; just as, apart from a mirror of one kind or another, no man can become acquainted with his own lineaments.