“Oh, Doctor John—I shudder at the thought of being liable to such an illusion! It seemed so real. Is there no cure?—no preventive?”
“Happiness is the cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both.”
No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.
“Cultivate happiness!” I said briefly to the doctor: “do you cultivate happiness? How do you manage?”
“I am a cheerful fellow by nature: and then ill-luck has never dogged me. Adversity gave me and my mother one passing scowl and brush, but we defied her, or rather laughed at her, and she went by.”.
“There is no cultivation in all this.”
“I do not give way to melancholy.”
“Yes: I have seen you subdued by that feeling.”
“About Ginevra Fanshawe—eh?”
“Did she not sometimes make you miserable?”