There is no pleasure of earth but, as soon as it becomes vivid, has a tendency to tinge itself with melancholy. The birth of an infant, the convalescence of a father, the return of a friend who has been long absent, fill the eyes with tears. Nature has thus chosen to mingle the colors of joy and sadness. Having destined us to experience each of the emotions in turn, she has[149] ordained that the shades of transition should melt into each other.[51]

The dearest remembrances are those which are accompanied by tenderness of heart. The sports of infancy, the first loves, the perils we have forever escaped, and the faults we have learned to repair, are of the number. Whoever will recollect the happiest moments of his life, will find them to have produced this emotion.

But there are two kinds of melancholy; or rather, we must not confound melancholy with gloom. Will the slight tenderness of sorrow which imparts a new charm to the fugitive pleasures of existence be inspired by those gloomy books which this age has attempted to bring into fashion; by those terrific and wild dreams in which hideous personages enact revolting scenes? Modern imagination has painted melancholy a tall and unearthly spectre enveloped in a winding sheet. The real traits of her countenance are those of innocence occupied in pleasant revery; and at the same time that tears are in her eyes, a smile dwells on her lips.

It is the resort of a sterile imagination and a cold heart, to invest even the tomb with borrowed ideas of darkness; to wait for night in which to visit it; and to torment the fancy to people it with sinister phantoms. Real sensibility would not require such an effort to be awakened. It fills my mind with a pleasing sadness to wander in the church-yard, under the melancholy radiance of the moon, among monuments of white marble, and hear the night breeze sigh among the weeping willows. I am deeply affected with, here and there, a touching inscription.[52] I remember one in which a[150] father says, that he has had five children, and that here sleeps the last that remained to him for consolation. In another, a father and mother announce that their daughter died at seventeen, a victim of their weak indulgence, and of the extravagant modes of the time. This sojourn of repose, these words written in the abodes of silence, which inspire tenderness for those that are no more, and those whose treasured affection still remembers them, always penetrate the soul with an emotion not without its charms. In the view of tombs, we immediately direct our thoughts to an internal survey of ourselves. I mark out my place among the peaceful mansions. I imagine the vernal grass and flowers reviving over my place of rest. My imagination transports me to the days which I shall not see, and sounds for me the soothing dirge of the adieus of friendship pronounced over the spot where I am laid.[53]

I generally carry from my sojourn in these our last mansions, one painful sentiment. I remark that many tombs are raised by parents for their children; by husbands for their wives; by widows for their husbands. I observe that there are but few erected by children for their fathers. Perhaps it is right that love should ascend in that scale, rather than descend in the other.

Occasional visits to ruins and tombs inspire salutary melancholy. But the habit of frequently contemplating these lugubrious objects is dangerous. It blunts sensibility and creates the necessity of always requiring strong emotions. It nourishes in the soul sombre ideas which do not associate with happiness. Without doubt, there are those who are so unhappy as to long for the repose of the grave; who find solace in these gloomy[151] spectacles. Young, after having lost his only daughter, after having in vain solicited a little consecrated earth to cover the remains of the youthful victim; after being reduced to the necessity of interring the loved one with his own hands, might be tempted to fly his kind and love only night, solitude and tombs. There have been men, condemned by the award of nature, to such reverses as nourish an incurable and perpetual melancholy. Their frigid imitators, without their reason and profound feeling, in wishing to render themselves singular, become tiresome and ridiculous in their melancholy.

Writers of the most splendid genius of the age have consecrated their talents to celebrate melancholy; not that melancholy which has a smile of profound sensibility, but that which has been cradled in tombs and which holds out to us the full draught of sadness. There is something in these heart-rending scenes, ............