into a real heart of flesh and blood.

Were he to meet with such a statement in the pages of an opponent, and he had opponents not a few, how would he fasten on it, how would he chuckle! He would tell him in no mincing terms, that he had placed the seat of passion in the heart chiefly because he was writing in English; that had he been writing in Greek, he might have placed it in the liver; that had he been writing in Hebrew, he would have placed it in the belly; and that had he been writing in Chinese, he would have placed it there is no saying where.

To the laws of pleasure which we have hitherto considered, but chiefly to the second, it will be found that most of the elder writers confine themselves. This should be noted; because it is to the parallel laws of poetry that they have been tied. On the other hand, it will be found, that later authors have paid more attention to that which is the third, the last, and the highest law, alike of pleasure and of poetry.

THE Third Law teaches that pleasure is unconscious; forgetting Self, and looking chiefly to the Unself.

We cannot waylay pleasure; we cannot hunt joy as we stalk for deer. Pleasure turns from the man that woos her, and to the heedless child flies unbidden. To ourselves she seldom gives note of her coming; she comes, like an angel, unheard, unseen, unknown, and not till she has gone or is parting from us, are our eyes opened to see what we have enjoyed. It was when the Saviour was vanishing from his disciples that they knew it was He; it was when the blissful vision on Tabor was passing away that Peter began to feel how good to be there. The moment we ask ourselves, Are we happy? we cease to be so. Thus it is that we can feel the present to be dull and weary; it would be as bright with sunshine as the past and the future, were we to take it as it is, and ask no questions. Thus also

would England now be as merry as old England, and the time being as good and happy as any that may yet be in store, not even excepting what Jeremy Collier has called, "the millenaal, paradisinical, earth." Pleasure says to every one of us what we say to children, Open your mouth, and shut your eyes.

This law has been expressed in manifold terms. Every lament said or sung of the fickleness of pleasure is an admission of the law. When Pope declares that "Man never is, but always to be, blest;" when, again, he describes happiness as that something "Which, still so near us, yet beyond us lies;" when Armstrong (in the Art of Preserving Health, a poem, by this time of day, well-nigh forgotten) describes it as a coy goddess who "Invites us still, and shifts as we pursue; when Barry Cornwall upbraids it as "The gay to-morrow of the mind which never comes;" all these are but ways of expressing two things, that pleasure consists in giving chase, and that the object of pleasure is never present, but always out of ourselves. Chiefly to this, although partly to the first law, belongs that overflow, that enlargement of heart (Tλarvoμós) to which Christian writers so often refer, sometimes speaking of it simply as glorious liberty, at other times, and with equal truth, regarding it as the very essence of joy. And that word which denotes the very highest pitch of enjoyment, to wit, ecstasy, comes to the same thing; for, in the Greek, it means transport, an outstanding,

ἔκστασις. * KoTaois. Likewise the great truth, so often repeated, that love is happiness, and the more of the one the more of the other, when put into formal language means, that happiness is an outgoing of the soul, and the farther out the more happiness. The more hopelessly we are in love with nature, the more heartily we enter into the joys and sorrows of our kindred, or, better still, the more entirely we give ourselves up to the worship and (are we not allowed to call it?) the fellowship of the Almighty Father; in a word, the more self is forgotten, and the mind sent abroad, for us the happiness is higher. So that the nearer we approach self-annihilation, the happier do we become; and if such a state were only possible, it would be the happiest of all. It is only possible, however, in death, or, perhaps, in a swoon; and thus it is that we hear persons who have been entranced and filled to overflowing with unutterable bliss, tell that they could have died, and were ready to melt away.

These remarks are fully borne out by all the accounts that have reached us of persons in a state of high enjoyment; and among others are well illustrated by the behaviour of those disciples to whom was given a foretaste of heaven on the Mount of Transfiguration. The

*To be distinguished, however, from Aristotle's definition of pain as an ekσTaσis, where a very different metaphor is intended. For he has before him the idea of something out of place, and uses the word in opposition to karáσraσis, as above cited (p. 23.) As pleasure is a κατάστασις, or settlement, so pain is an ἔκστασις or unsettlement.

bliss was too strong for them, and so blinded their souls that they were overpowered with sleep. When they had somewhat recovered, they were so bewildered, that of Peter it is told-he knew neither what to say, nor what he said: indeed, what he could have meant by proposing to build three booths it is hard to understand. In like manner, when Saint Paul was caught up into the third heaven, he knew not whether he were dead or alive, in the body or out of the body; and so far also might credit be given to the legends of Ignatius Loyola, and other Romish saints, if, without bringing forward the witness of other men, it were simply related, that in the warmth of their devotions, these worthies felt as if lifted from the ground. Perfect joy will not keep house with perfect knowledge. In so far as we become self-conscious, there is no room for joy; and on the other hand, as Hooker finely brings out (Eccles. Pol. v. 67), “the mind, feeling present joy, is always marvellous unwilling to admit any other cogitation, and in that case casteth off those disputes whereunto the intellectual part at other times easily draweth. A manifest effect whereof may be noted if we compare with our Lord's disciples in the twentieth of John, the people that are said in the sixth of John to have gone after him to Capernaum. These leaving him on the one side of the sea of Tiberias, and finding him again, as soon as themselves by ship were arrived, on the contrary side, whither they knew that by ship he came not, and by land the