C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Gaiety
Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.
Gaiety is the soul’s health; sadness is its poison.
Gaiety pleases more when we are assured that it does not cover carelessness.
Some people are commended for a giddy kind of good-humor, which is as much a virtue as drunkenness.
Leaves seem light and useless, and idle and wavering, and changeable—they even dance; yet God has made them part of the oak. In so doing, He has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without.
Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain; good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.
Is there anything in life so lovely and poetical as the laugh and merriment of a young girl, who, still in harmony with all her powers, sports with you in luxuriant freedom, and in her mirthfulness neither despises nor dislikes? Her gravity is seldom as innocent as her playfulness; still less that haughty discontent which converts the youthful Psyche into a dull, thick, buzzing, wing-drooping night moth.