A Private History of Happiness

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Book: A Private History of Happiness Read Online Free PDF
Author: George Myerson
poet of Scotland, was twenty-eight when he wrote this letter to his friend James Smith about a summer night in the wild Scottish Highlands. Burns had published his first book of poems, which instantly turned him from a struggling farmer into a literary celebrity. Now he was escaping from Edinburgh, where he had been feted, into the countryside.
    Burns loved his summer trip in the Highlands, which he described in another letter to his friend as “a country where savage streams tumble over savage mountains, thinly overspread with savage flocks.” This June 30 was the best night of a wonderful summer of freedom.
    There were two great social pleasures that night. First, there was the company that was dancing together, men and women, until three in the morning: “the ladies sung Scotch songs like angels, at intervals; then we flew at the Bab at the bowster, Tullochgorum and Loch Erroch side.”These were fiddle tunes that he could play himself.They had danced the popular dances. They knew these rhythms, because they had grown up with them. These were the songs and tunes of a rural way of life, and he was happy that the members of the party could share this music together.
    At the height of the enjoyment, Burns suddenly had a vision as if from far away. He seemed to see them all, moving like tiny insects in the air, “like midges sporting in the sun.”
    The vision only amused him, and now another, perhaps even greater, pleasure followed the dancing. After the women had gone to bed, the men carried on drinking until six in the morning. Noticing the light in the sky, they went outside and welcomed the dawn together. They all kneeled, with the landlord’s son holding the ceremonial bowl and Burns “as priest” chanting some crazy rhymes to greet the new day. It was fun but also held a deeper happiness. He experienced an absolute joy at being alive, alive together with friends in the Highlands to see a new “day peering over the towering top of Benlomond.”
    Later in the same letter he confessed to being still unsure of his path in the world, since he had “yet fixed on nothing with respect to the serious business of life. I am, just as usual, a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless, idle fellow.” Doubts lurked in his mind about whether he really wanted the life that his literary success was bringing him.
    But on this night, he had been briefly free of those nagging doubts. It was the company of friends that had freed him from his inner struggles.

In Anticipation of a Gentleman’s Visit
    Mary Russell Mitford, writer, composing a letter to a friend
    READING, BERKSHIRE • APRIL 5, 1814
    I think you must have guessed, my dear Sir William [Elford], when I talked of presumptuous hopes, or rather presumptuous wishes (I don’t think I got so far as hopes), that I was impudent enough to desire [. . .] that you would favour us with a visit here [. . .]
    I suspect, however, that you have as much pleasure in pleasing as in being pleased —in making happy as in being happy; that in default of greenhouse plants (and our greenhouse is a real vegetable churchyard—a collection of dead stumps and withered leaves), you will be well content with cowslips and wood anemones; and instead of beaux and belles, will graciously accept the company of a whole flight of nightingales whom I have invited to meet you. And, in conclusion, that unless it is absolutely inconvenient (and, unreasonable as you may think me, I am not unreasonable enough even to wish you to come if it is), you will give your poor little fat friend the happiness of seeing you.

    Mary Mitford lived with her parents just outside the English town of Reading. They had a grand house that her father, a doctor, had built. But he had only been enabled to do so by the proceeds of a winning lottery ticket that Mary had chosen at the age of ten. An extravagant gambler from an aristocratic background, his losses were on the way to ruining the family despite this good fortune, as he
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