Thus time, the _great consoler_, assuages our sorrows, and the unbroken darkness that once hung over the mind, and shrouded all its thoughts and purposes, gives place, at length, to a chastened and subdued sadness, that suffuses the past with a soft and mellow radiance. We are ever moving on, swiftly, steadily, in the current of events, and objects whose fearful magnitude, once, from their very nearness, engrossed our whole attention as we passed into their deep shadow, gradually diminish as they recede, until their dark outline is barely discernible on the distant horizon. § III.--SYMPATHY WITH THE HAPPINESS AND SORROW OF OTHERS. _In what Manner awakened._--Closely allied to the emotions of joy and sorrow awakened by our own personal experience of good and of evil, is the sympathy we feel with the joys and sorrows of others in similar circumstances. Joy is contagious. So also is grief. We cannot behold the emotions of others, without, in some degree, experiencing a corresponding emotion. Nor is it necessary to be eye-witnesses of that happiness, or sorrow. The simple description of any scene of happiness or of misery affects the heart, and touches the chords of sympathetic emotion. We picture the scene to ourselves, we fancy ourselves the spectators, or, it may be, the actors and the sufferers; we imagine what would be our own emotions in such a case, and in proportion to the liveliness of our power of conception, and also of our power of feeling, will be our sympathy with the real scene and the real sufferers.