"Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears. It is a gleam of unreckoned gold. From the nature of the case, our happiness, such as in its degree it has been, lives in memory. We have not the voice itself; we have only its echo. We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once."
-- Alexander Smith, "Of Death and the Fear of Dying" in Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (Edinburgh, 1888), p. 60.
