They were, indeed, _too_ happy! I do not mean too happy to be virtuous, too happy to be mindful of, and grateful to, the Giver of all joy—but, as the common phrase runs, too happy for their happiness to be enduring. That is a strange belief—a wondrous superstition!—and yet it has been common to all ages. The Greeks, those wild poetic dreamers, imagined that their vain gods, made up of mortal attributes, _envied_ the bliss of men, fearing that wretched earthlings should vie in happiness with the possessors of Olympus. They sang in their dark mystic choruses, “That perfect bliss of men not childless dies, But, ended, leaves a progeny behind Of woes, that spring from fairest fortune blind—” and, though their other doctrines of that insuperable destiny, that absolute necessity, to resist which is needless labor; and of ancestral guilt, still reproducing guilt through countless generations, would seem to militate against it, there was no more established faith, and no more prevalent opinion, than that unwonted fortunes were necessarily followed by most unusual wo—hence, perhaps, the stern self-mortification of the middle ages—hence, certainly, the vulgar terror, prevalent more or less among all classes, and in every time and country, that children are too beautiful, too prematurely wise, too good, to be long-lived—that happiness is too great to be lasting—that mornings are too fine to augur stormless days! And we—aye! we ourselves—we of a better and purer dispensation—we half believe all this, and more than half tremble at it, although in truth there is no cause for fear in the belief—since, if there be aught of truth in the mysterious creed, which facts do in a certain sense seem to bear out, we can but think, we cannot but perceive, that this is but a varied form of care and mercy vouchsafed by the Great All-perfect, towards his frail creatures—that this is but a merciful provision to hinder us from laying up for ourselves “treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal”—a provision to restrain us from forgetting, in the small temporary bliss of the present, the boundless and incomparable beatitude of the future—to warn us against bartering, like Esau, our birthright for a mess of pottage. But I am not now called to follow out this train of thought, suggested by the change in the fortunes of those to whom I am performing the part of historian—by the change I say in their fortunes—a change arising, too, from the very circumstances, as is so frequently the case, which seemed to promise the most fairly for their improvement and their permanence—oh, how blind guides are we—even the most far-sighted of us all—how weak and senseless judges, even the most sagacious—how false and erring prophets, even the wisest and the best!—