happy valley

Here the sons and daughters of Abissinia lived only to know the soft
vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all that were skilful to
delight, and gratified with whatever the senses can enjoy. They wandered in
gardens of fragrance, and slept in the fortresses of security. Every art was
practised to make them pleased with their own condition. The sages who
instructed them, told them of nothing but the miseries of publick life, and
described all beyond the mountains as regions of calamity, where discord was
always raging, and where man preyed upon man.
    To heighten their opinion of their own felicity, they were daily entertained
with songs, the subject of which was the happy valley. Their appetites were
excited by frequent enumerations of different enjoyments, and revelry and
merriment was the business of every hour from the dawn of morning to the close
of even.
    These methods were generally successful; few of the Princes had ever wished
to enlarge their bounds, but passed their lives in full conviction that they had
all within their reach that art or nature could bestow, and pitied those whom
fate had excluded from this seat of tranquillity, as the sport of chance, and
the slaves of misery.
    Thus they rose in the morning, and lay down at night, pleased with each
other and with themselves, all but Rasselas, who, in the twenty-sixth year of
his age, began to withdraw himself from their pastimes and assemblies, and to
delight in solitary walks and silent meditation. He often sat before tables
covered with luxury, and forgot to taste the dainties that were placed before
him: he rose abruptly in the midst of the song, and hastily retired beyond the
sound of musick. His attendants observed the change and endeavoured to renew his
love of pleasure: he neglected their officiousness, repulsed their invitations,
and spent day after day on the banks of rivulets sheltered with trees, where he
sometimes listened to the birds in the branches, sometimes observed the fish
playing in the stream, and anon cast his eyes upon the pastures and mountains
filled with animals, of which some were biting the herbage, and some sleeping
among the bushes.
    This singularity of his humour made him much observed. One of the Sages, in
whose conversation he had formerly delighted, followed him secretly, in hope of
discovering the cause of his disquiet. Rasselas, who knew not that any one was
near him, having for some time fixed his eyes upon the goats that were brousing
among the rocks, began to compare their condition with his own.
    »What, said he, makes the difference between man and all