Indeed, it might almost be said that pain and sorrow were the indispensable conditions of some men's success, and the necessary means to evoke the highest development of their genius.

Shelley has said of poets: "Most wretched men are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song." Does any one suppose that Burns would have sung as he did, had he been rich, respectable, and "kept a gig;" or Byron, if he had been a prosperous, happily-married Lord Privy Seal or Postmaster-General?
Sometimes a heartbreak rouses an impassive nature to life.

"What does he know," said a sage, "who has not suffered ?" When Dumas asked Reboul, "What made you a poet ?" his answer was, "Suffering!" It was the death, first of his wife, and then of his child, that drove him into solitude for the indulgence of his grief, and eventually led him to seek and find relief in verse.

[2114] It was also to a domestic affliction that we owe the beautiful writings of Mrs.Gaskell.

"It was as a recreation, in the highest sense of the word," says a recent writer, speaking from personal knowledge, "as an escape from the great void of a life from which a cherished presence had been taken, that she began that series of exquisite creations which has served to multiply the number of our acquaintances, and to enlarge even the circle of our friendships." [2115] Much of the best and most useful work done by men and women has been done amidst affliction--sometimes as a relief from it, sometimes from a sense of duty overpowering personal sorrow.