would break pitilessly bright, flowers would bloom, fruit-tree boughs wear pink and white; and although there would be no eye to witness, Summer would not adorn herself with one blossom the less.  It is curious to think how important a creature a man is to himself.  We cannot help thinking that all things exist for our particular selves.  The sun, in whose light a system lives, warms me; makes the trees grow for me; paints the evening sky in gorgeous colours for me.  The mould I till, produced from the beds of extinct oceans and the grating of rock and mountain during countless centuries, exists that I may have muffins to breakfast.  Animal life, with its strange instincts and affections, is to be recognised and cherished,—­for does it not draw my burdens for me, and carry me from place to place, and yield me comfortable broadcloth, and succulent joints to dinner?  I think it matter of complaint that Nature, like a personal friend to whom I have done kind services, will not wear crape at my funeral.  I think it cruel that the sun should shine, and birds sing, and I lying in my grave.  People talk of the age of the world!  So far as I am concerned, it began with my consciousness, and will end with my decease.

And yet, this self-consciousness, which so continually besets us, is in itself a misery and a galling chain.  We are never happy till by imagination we are taken out of the pales and limits of self.  We receive happiness at second hand:  the spring of it may be in ourselves, but we do not know it to be happiness, till, like the sun’s light from the moon, it is reflected on us from an object outside.  The admixture of a foreign element sweetens and unfamiliarises it.  Sheridan prepared his good things in solitude, but he tasted for the first time his jest’s prosperity when it came back to him in illumined faces and a roar of applause.  Your oldest story becomes new when you have a new auditor.  A young man is truth-loving and amiable, but it is only when these fair qualities shine upon him from a girl’s face that he is smitten by transport—­only then is he truly happy.  In that junction of hearts, in that ecstasy of mutual admiration and delight, the finest epithalamium ever writ by poet is hardly worthy of the occasion.  The countryman purchases oranges at a fair for his little ones; and when he brings them home in the evening, and watches his chubby urchins, sitting up among the bed-clothes, peel and devour the fruit, he is for the time-being richer than if he drew the rental of the orange-groves of Seville.  To eat an orange himself is nothing; to see them eat it is a pleasure worth the price of the fruit a thousand times over.  There is no happiness in the world in which love does not enter; and love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.  Apart from others no man can make his happiness; just as, apart from a mirror of one kind or another, no man can become acquainted with his own lineaments.