CHAPTER XXVI.
FURTHER CONCERNING THEOPHIL'S LIFE AFTER THE DEATH OF JENNY Knowing the quick but little love Much mention of the dead.
I hesitate further to continue that history of a grief of which, nevertheless, this book has now little heart or purpose to be other than the record, and, as what I shall write in this chapter must seem meaningless and wearisome to all but those who belong to the great Secret Society of Sorrow, it were no doubt just as well that those who have known nothing but joy should follow their natural impulse and leave it unread.

I confess, too, that I should feel the more comfortable without the regard of their happy, ignorant eyes.
Sorrow is a mysticism, and to talk of it to those who have never known the initiation of tears is like talking alchemy to a child.

Sorrow, too, is an aristocracy, and when Theophil came to realise that, as Jenny had been found worthy to die, he had been found worthy to suffer, it seemed to him almost vulgar only to have been happy.

Happiness is such a materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a _bourgeois_ who has not yet attained the rank of a soul.

The influence of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity has been upon the world.