27. 
(“For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?”).
28. 
(“And a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.”).
29. 
(“God has fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again: as it is also written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.”).
30. “Sympathy with death”—that was the expression Thomas Mann felt was most characteristic of himself.
~ ~ ~
1. At the opening of his poem Il Penseroso, Milton wards off good humor:
Hence vain deluding joyes,
The brood of folly without father bred,
How little you bested,
Or fill the fixed mind with all your toyes.
In the twentieth century, in a formulation appropriate to the times, Walter Benjamin wrote: “For whereas in the realm of the emotions it is not unusual for the relation between an intention and its object to alternate between attraction and repulsion, mourning is capable of a special intensification, a progressive deepening of its intention” (German Tragic Drama, 139).
2. Walter Benjamin, admittedly with some exaggeration, explained Baudelairean spleen and melancholia as being due to intellectuals becoming commodities.
3. Milton expressed a similar opinion, characterizing melancholia as a “pensive Nun, devout and pure” (Il Penseroso, l. 31).
4. The sonnet “Einsamkeit” (“Loneliness”) by Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664) is a characteristic work of melancholia over a landscape.
5. In Germany in the sixteenth century, bare, dead trees were being called Saturn’s trees—Saturnbäume—complicating further the connections between astrology, theories of humor, and melancholic notions of nature.
6. “I was born in the Planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that Leaden Planet in me” (Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, pt. 2, sec. 11).
7. In the last two stanzas, the final couplets are modified to: “All my joys to this are folly, / None so divine as melancholy,” and “All my griefs to this are jolly, / Naught so damn’d as melancholy”—this melancholia extends equally to heaven and hell.
8. The popularity of books about melancholia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is striking. Timothie Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie was printed in two separate editions when it was first published in 1586, and was republished in 1613. An English translation of Juan Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios para las sciencias of 1575 reached four editions between 1594 and 1616; Thomas Wright’s The Passions of Minde in generall first appeared in 1601, reappeared in 1604 “corrected, enlarged, and with sundry new discourses augmented,” and was reissued in 1621 and 1630; André du Laurens’s Discours de la conservation de la vene: des maladies mélancholiques, des catarrhes et de la vieillesse was first published in Paris and reached ten editions between 1597 and 1626, being also translated into Latin and Italian as well as into English in 1599 by Richard Surphlet (A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old age). Robert Burton’s colossal Anatomy of Melancholy saw as many as seven reprints between 1621 and 1676 before vanishing (it reappeared 124 years later, at the start of the Romantic era).
9. In this, Burton was endorsing a medieval notion: according to Avicenna, speaking in tongues indicated the presence of Satan.
10. In Spain, physicians tried to cure Charles II’s melancholia by prescribing that he watch as many autos-da-fé as possible. For the melancholic king, death presumably had a different meaning than it did for those who were bound to the stake.
11. According to Constantine the African as well, music was the most effective remedy. In the early 1300s, and for some four centuries thereafter, in the southern Italian region of Apulia, a slothfulness that was called melancholia, allegedly due to the bites of poisonous spiders, spread epidemically through the town of Taranto. Patients were impelled to dance to the music of fife and drums (hence the derivation of the dance—“tarantella” meaning “little spider”), and this remedy was still being recommended in the seventeenth century, with flute and drum being given preference, because string instruments were supposedly unable to drive melancholia away.
12. Jean Starobinski mentions some counterexamples as welclass="underline" in the seventeenth century, at the time so-called affectology was born, the idea that music was therapeutic was revived in works such as Anne-Charles Lorry, De melancholia et morbis melancholicis (1765), and Pierre-Joseph Buchoz, Mémoire sur la manière de guérir la mélancolie par la musique (1761).
13. One may add that Ficino, despite all his complaining, considered melancholia to be the most splendid state; music, which sweetens melancholia, thereby took possession of the whole person: “The sound of music,” he writes, “assails the body through air movement; through the cleansed air it excites the aerial spirit, which is a link between the body and the soul; through the emotions it acts on the senses and at the same time on the soul; through interpretation it touches the intellect; finally, by means of that same easy air movement, it softly caresses us, the pleasantness of its material overwhelming us with marvelous delight; through its intellectual and material nature it simultaneously captivates and totally takes possession of the whole person” (quoted in Starobinski, Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie, 78).
14. For an example of the thematic, programmatic deployment of melancholia, see the Trio Sonata in C Minor for two violins and continuo of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, in which Melancholia and Sanguineus argue, only to be reconciled in the last movement, or the adagio introduction (entitled “La Malincolia”) to the Finale of Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 6 in B-flat Major, op. 18, no. 6.
15. It was not entirely without precedent: the Hellenistic typology of humors came into existence under similar circumstances.
16. “Those who do not bore themselves,” writes Kierkegaard, “are generally people who, in one way or another, keep themselves extremely busy; these people are precisely on this account the most tiresome, the most utterly unendurable” (Either/Or, 237).
17. In La Chanson de Roland, it meant worry, pain, but in the twelfth century it denoted weariness.
18. Péter Pázmány (1570–1637), a Hungarian philosopher, theologian, Catholic cardinal, pulpit orator, and statesman, was an important figure in the Counter-Reformation in Royal Hungary.
19. Transylvanian-born András Illyés (1637–1712) was a Catholic bishop.
20. A Calvinist preacher (1628–1696).
21. “Society is now one polish’d horde, / Form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored,” Byron writes in Don Juan (canto 13, 95).
22. Protestantism, especially Puritanism, smuggled God into its concept of laziness, but it was the neglect of earthly matters that was regarded as the fundamental lapse.