Such considerations as these, drawn from the unalterable laws of nature and life, show how short is the sight of those who look upon happiness as the uninterrupted continuance of pleasurable sensations, or would seek it in a ceaseless round of gayety. Far clearer was the vision of Pindar when he exclaimed, with the inspiration of a poet,――“Beneath every true pleasure hides the sense of a past pain.” The dark background of sorrow can alone give full relief to the bright figure of joy. Grief is a part of gladness, and that life is not happy which has no unhappiness. So Browning, with characteristic insight and strength, puts in the mouth of one of his intensest characters,――“Naught is lacking to complete our bliss, but woe.” These are not mere paradoxes and literary refinements on scientific facts. All who have entered sympathetically into the deep and tender emotions of the human heart have felt and seen this mysterious and inseparable connection. It is so beautifully set forth in reference to one of the saddest griefs of life by Leigh Hunt, that I must quote his words. They are in his essay on the “Deaths of Little Children.” “Pain softens into pleasure as the darker hue of the rainbow melts into the brighter.… Made as we are, there are certain pains without which it would be difficult to conceive certain great and overbalancing pleasures. We may conceive it possible for beings to be made entirely happy; but in our composition, something of pain seems to be a necessary ingredient in order that the materials may turn to as fine an account as possible. The loss of children seems to be one of those necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. If none at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or a woman secured; and it will easily be conceived what a world of endearing cares and hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are the only persons who, in one sense, retain it always; and they furnish their neighbors with the same idea. The other children grow up to manhood or to womanhood and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence. “Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our fancy and our hopes; they are the ever-smiling emblems of joy; the prettiest pages that wait upon imagination; lastly, 'Of these are the Kingdom of Heaven.’”