So they set themselves to reach this, and having gained
it, gave it their principal thoughts, and set it off with beautiful
dress as best they might. But making this their object, they were
obliged to pass their lives in simple exercise and disciplined
employments. Living wholesomely, giving themselves no fever fits,
either by fasting or over-eating, constantly in the open air, and full
of animal spirit and physical power, they became incapable of every
morbid condition of mental emotion. Unhappy love, disappointed
ambition, spiritual despondency, or any other disturbing sensation,
had little power over the well-braced nerves, and healthy flow of the
blood; and what bitterness might yet fasten on them was soon boxed or
raced out of a boy, and spun or woven out of a girl, or danced out of
both. They had indeed their sorrows, true and deep, but still, more
like children's sorrows than ours, whether bursting into open cry of
pain, or hid with shuddering under the veil, still passing over the
soul as clouds do over heaven, not sullying it, not mingling with
it;--darkening it perhaps long or utterly, but still not becoming one
with it, and for the most part passing away in dashing rain of tears,
and leaving the man unchanged; in no wise affecting, as our sorrow
does, the whole tone of his thought and imagination thenceforward.
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