The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, April 1884, No. 7 — John Shaqi
The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, April 1884, No. 7Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Religion
The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, April 1884, No. 7
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
The misery of a heart thus bereft of all relish for that which is wont
to minister to its enjoyment, is strikingly exemplified in those who,
satiated with indulgence, have been so belabored, as it were, with
the variety and the poignancy of the pleasurable sensations that they
have experienced, that they are at length fatigued out of all capacity
for sensation whatever. The disease of ennui is more frequent in the
French metropolis, where amusement is more exclusively the occupation
of higher classes, than it is in the British metropolis, where the
longings of the heart are more diversified by the resources of business
and politics. There are the votaries of fashion, who, in this way, have
at length become the victims of fashionable excess, in whom the very
multitude of their enjoyments has at last extinguished their power of
enjoyment—who, plied with the delights of sense and of splendor even to
weariness, and incapable of higher delights, have come to the end of all
their perfection, and, like Solomon of old, found it to be vanity and
vexation. The man whose heart has thus been turned into a desert can
vouch for the insupportable languor which must ensue, when one affection
is thus plucked away from the bosom, without another to replace it.
It is not necessary that a man receive pain from anything in order to
become miserable. It is barely enough that he looks with distaste at
everything—and in that asylum which is the repository of minds out of
joint, and where the organ of feeling as well as the organ of intellect,
has been impaired, it is not in the cell of loud and frantic outcries
where you will meet with the acme of mental suffering. But that is the
individual who outpeers in wretchedness all his fellows, who throughout
the whole expanse of nature and society, meets not an object that has at
all the power to detain or interest him; who neither in earth beneath,
nor in heaven above, knows of a single charm to which his heart can
send forth one desirous or responding movement; to whom the world, in
his eye a vast and empty desolation, has left him nothing but his own
consciousness to feed upon—dead to all that is without him, and alive to
nothing but to the load of his own torpid and useless existence.
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