The Happiest People in the World

Here is a selection from Dorothy Osborne's Letters that I found in Woolf's A Room of One's Own.


"The heat of the day is spent in reading or working and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walkeout into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare their voyces and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vaste difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee. I talke to them, and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the knoledge that they are soe. most commonly when we are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at theire heels."

The happiest people in the world, "but the knoledge that they are soe." It makes me wonder, am I in that category as well? I think so. And the more so, because I know it. But I cannot allow fear of diminishing happiness to darken my happiness:

"What though my joys and comforts die? The Lord my Savior liveth! / What though the darkness gather 'round? Songs in the night He giveth! / No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I'm clinging! / While love is Lord of heav'n and earth, how can I keep from singing?!"

Maybe Christians are the happiest and solemnest people on earth.