Thoughtless readers of "David
Copperfield" laugh at Mr. Micawber, and his rapid passages from the
depth of despair to the summit of happiness, and back again. But if you
have seen or experienced that morbid condition, you would know that
there is more reason to mourn over it than to laugh at it. There
is acute misery felt now and then; and there is a pervading,
never-departing sense of the hollowness of the morbid mirth. It is but
a very few degrees better than "moody madness, laughing wild, amid
severest woe." By depression of spirits I understand a dejection without
any cause that could be stated, or from causes which in a healthy mind
would produce no such degree of dejection. No doubt, many men can
remember seasons of dejection which was not imaginary, and of anxiety
and misery whose causes were only too real. You can remember, perhaps,
the dark time in which you knew quite well what it was that made it so
dark. Well, better days have come. That sorrowful, wearing time, which
exhausted the springs of life faster than ordinary living would have
done, which aged you in heart and frame before your day, dragged over,
and it is gone. You carried heavy weight, indeed, while it lasted. It
was but poor running you made, poor work you did, with that feeble,
anxious, disappointed, miserable heart.
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