PREFACE 



IT is probably a mere philological accident, devoid of 

 moral significance, that, in the whole of the English 

 version of the Old and New Testaments, there is not 

 a single instance of the use of the substantives ' enjoy- 

 ment' and 'happiness.' Frequent mention of 'joy' 

 and ' pleasure,' but the first seems to verge too closely 

 upon the boisterous, or at least the exuberant, and the 

 other to have become tainted too grossly in human 

 handling to express precisely the sensation stirred by 

 weather fair or foul, by noble landscape, by the every- 

 day operations of nature, and by communion, oral or 

 literary, with higher intellects than our own. One 

 derives pleasure from, and feels joy in, all such things, 

 but they inspire something incapable of interpretation 

 by either of these terms; something which the 

 French denote by bonheur, and we, in defiance of 

 obvious etymology, by ' happiness.' 



This mood of happiness is not to be separated from 

 a sense of gratitude towards an object more or less 

 definite, yet is so fleeting withal, that the mood and 



