tation. In what is called circular insanity, phases of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we can discover, and often enough to one and the same well person life will offer incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical books used to call the concoction of the humors. In the words of the newspaper joke, “it depends on the liver.” Rousseau's ill-balanced constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. And some men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman’s was of gloom, and they have left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his–the exquisite Leopardi, for example, or our
