What we have principally to contend against, and to treat with due contempt, in sorrow, as in anger, is its paralysing poisonous sweetness, which we are so loth to exchange for the exertion of consoling ourselves and of exercising our reasoning faculties. We must not expect Philosophy to produce, with one stroke of the pen, the converse effect to that which Rubens produced, when he converted a smiling child into a weeping one with one stroke of his brush. It is sufficient if she converts the soul's deep mourning garb into half-mourning; it is enough when I can say to myself, "I am content to bear that share of my sorrow of which my philosophy has not relieved me; but for her it would have been greater--the gnat's sting would have been a wasp's." It is only through the imagination, as from an electric condenser, that even physical pain emits its sparks upon us. We would bear the severest physical pains without a wince if they were not of longer duration than a sixtieth part of a second; but we never really do have an hour of pain to endure, but only a succession of sixtieth parts of a second of pain, the sixty separate rays of which are concentrated into the focus and burning-point of a second, and directed upon our nerves by the imagination alone. The most painful part of corporeal pain is the _in_corporeal part of it, that is to say, our own impatience, and our delusive conviction that it will last for ever. We all know for certain that we shall have given up grieving for many a loss, in twenty, ten, or two years why do we not say to ourselves, "Very well--if this is an opinion which I shall cease to hold in twenty years' time,--I prefer to abandon it to-day, at once? Why must it take me twenty years to abandon an error, when I need not hold it twenty hours?" When I awake from a dream which has painted for me an Otaheite on the black background of the night, and find the flowery land melted away, I scarcely sigh, and I think it was but a dream. How were it if I had actually possessed this flowery island in waking life, and it had been submerged in the sea by an earthquake? Why should I not, _then_ also, say, "The island was but a dream"? Why am I more inconsolable for the loss of a LONGER dream than for the loss of a SHORTER (for that is what constitutes the distinction),--and why does man think a great loss less necessary and less probable than a small?