r next year。 Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind。 Disease is metrical; closing in at shorter and shorter periods towards death; sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards recovery。 Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday; and will be intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear; but the cause has not passed。 Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain—it returns。 Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise。 If we had made a course of notes of its visits; we might have been on the watch; and would have had an expectation instead of a discovery。 No one makes such observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world; there have never e to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles。 But Thomas à Kempis knew of the recurrences; if he did not measure them。 In his cell alone with the elements—“What wouldst thou more than these for out of these were all things made”—he learnt the stay to be found in the depth of the hour of bitterness; and the remembrance that restrains the soul at the ing of the moment of delight; giving it a more conscious wele; but presaging for it an inexorable flight。 And “rarely; rarely est thou;” sighed Shelley; not to Delight merely; but to the Spirit of Delight。 Delight can be pelled beforehand; called; and constrained to our service—Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life out of metre; and it is not the spirit that is thus pelled。 THAT flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically curved; keeping no man knows what trysts with Time。
It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the IMITATION should both have been keen and simple enou