Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/24

 If an animal is capable of having a consecutive dream, as Miss Mitford's greyhound was, who regularly every year, just before the coursing season began, used to dream of going out, and quested in his sleep, such an animal can feel the torment of ennui. He is not blindly indicating that a season has come around,—as a wound made by the bite of a lion will gape anew in the same month of the following year, and the juice of the grape is agitated in remembrance of its vintage,—but the animal is conscious that the time has come for him to resume his talent.

Such dogs become tired of waiting if their masters are absent, and are disquieted if their day's routine be changed. And you will notice in a zoölogical garden many of the better-educated animals to whom the monotony of their life is a positive sorrow, till, like opium, it stupefies their spirits. They have not the resource of man, who is also devoured with ennui, but, furnished with imagination, can dissipate its most tragic moods by heart-shaking and sky-splitting laughter. His most climbing grief is like an Alpine flower that sits close to the snow-line and takes its color; but near at hand are hillsides sprinkled with winking wild-flowers, and the blue succory stands amid the corn. There is but a step from one to the other.

That step is taken, and the gravity of life upset whenever any of our ideas can suddenly and for a moment join an object or another idea, and appear to belong to it, though essentially different in every respect, and only capable of seeming like by the imagination starting a