_Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid._ The very exuberance of human happiness tends to suggest its opposite. Gibbon felt simply as a man when he felt what he has described in a memorable passage relating to his sense of gratified triumph at the conclusion of his _magnum opus_. It was between the hours of eleven and twelve, he records, on a calm night in June, that he wrote the last lines of his last page in a summer-house in his garden at Lausanne. After laying down his pen, he took several turns in a covered walk of acacias, which commanded a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. “I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history the life of the historian must be short and precarious.” It is the common lot. It is but another reading of the complaint in Prior’s pastorals— “Yet thus beloved, thus loving to excess, Yet thus receiving and returning bliss, In this great moment, in this golden Now, ... A melancholy tear afflicts my eye, And my heart labours with a sudden sigh; Invading fears repel my coward joy, And ills foreseen the present bliss destroy.” Or as elsewhere the same poet gloomily exclaims, and fruitlessly supplicates— “O impotent estate of human life, Where hope and fear maintain eternal strife! Where fleeting joy does lasting doubt inspire, And most we question what we most desire! Amongst Thy various gifts, great Heaven, bestow Our cup of love unmixed; forbear to throw Bitter ingredients in; nor pall the draught With nauseous grief.” Hardly can it be called, though the author of “The Ring and the Book” does call it,— ... “strange how, even when most secure In our domestic peace, a certain dim And flitting shade can sadden all; it seems A restlessness of heart, a silent yearning, A sense of something wanting, incomplete.”