561
To let also our happiness shine.—Just as the painters are utterly unable to reproduce the deep, brilliant hue of the sky, and are compelled to take all colours required for their landscapes a few shades deeper than Nature has them; just as they, by means of this trick, succeed in approaching the brilliant and harmonious tints in Nature, so also the poets and philosophers can express the bright radiance of happiness and must try to find an expedient; by picturing all things a few shades darker than they really are their light, in which they excel, produces almost the same effect as the sunlight and resembles the light of true happiness. The pessimist who gives to all things the darkest and gloomiest shades only avails himself of flames and lightning, celestial glories, and all that has a glaring, illuminative power and dazzles the eyes; to him light only serves the purpose of increasing the dismay and making us anticipate in the things greater horrors than they really have.
562
The settled and the free.—Only in the Netherworld we yet a glimpse of the gloomy background of all the adventurer’s bliss which forms an eternal halo round Ulysses and his kin, vying in brilliancy with the phosphorescence of the sea—of that background which we
