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-S>- I.
¦ " is a laughing animal ; " " , " says another , "is a cooking animal" " man" another ( that ' s myself ) " is a discontented
animal . " And . tlie , says hihest stle of man isI , affirmthe " diseontentedest . " The Eng g lishman y who is worth , y of his , birthright
never knows when he is _Tbeaten : I add , —and never knows when he has had h of a thingor when it is done well enough .
More and more enoug ! better and better , ! and so on , till the serpent takes its tail in its mouth and then da capo . For the rest the right of
Discontent to its Utterance has been already touched upon . The hater of thing who never tells his hatebutwith a
green and any yellow melanchol wrong , y , goes sitting like a , quaker , in a broadbrimsmiling at what he hates ;—let no such man be trusted 1
In particular , , let no girl marry him . He is just the person to vow eternal loving and cherishing , while he is inwardly conscious of a
dissatisfaction with the maiden of his dis-choice which , when the knot is tied , "will go smouldering on and keeping up a perpetual
smell of fire in his home , to the proximate perdition of both , and the dailtorture of the -wifewho will never be able to make out
" what it y is _that's burning , , my dear , " though her woman ' s heart will apprise her of smoking tinder somewhere . / have known such
cases . How differently it befalls with the man who , when dissatisfied ,
never says so wonders ! Look what at it him is that in a is domestic burning ; point —because of view why . ? His He wife tells
her before she has time to wonder . Take him as a citizen , as a social being . If he sees anything that he does not like , he says so ;
he tells society what is wrong ; he grumbles ; he badgers : —say rather , he stimulates , energizes , impels ,
Allures . . . * ' g reprove hter worlds s each , and dull leads delay the , way . "
" And leads the way ? " Yes : for he makes of his dissatisfaction a religion , and it developes a proper , natural cultus
of activity . Will anybody dare to assert that the world owes have anything been to supposed contented debtors men to — the except Helots as the systematicall young Sp y intoxicated tans may
for their good ? Discontent , disconten , t , discontent is the great wailing pioneer and amid precursor the lines of of all good humanity things ' s . march When the his bug voice le is of he hope ard
, replies . I grant there is nothing " constructive" in discontent . ; there is " nothing in it" if lease . But what is there in the
mould of the artist ? Discontent , you p is the mould in which the positive forms of future life are cast ! I grant discontent is not " creative ; "
it is only the murmur of Chaos for the Light and the Word ; but so surely as it arises upon the deep , the brooding Dove comes
down , and soon a firmament is spread to divide the waters from the waters .
[ Let me not grow dithyrambic . It is not in my mood to indite a
hymn in praise of Discontent , or to write an " anatomy " of it , as
English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), June 1, 1858, page 263, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01061858/page/47/