Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Happiness is cast here not as a feeling you stumble into, but as an organizer with a clipboard: “mistress of the ceremonies” implies choreography, sequencing, even a little manipulation. Colton’s image flatters happiness with grandeur, then quietly undercuts it. If happiness is running the “dance of life,” we’re not fully in charge of the music, the tempo, or the next partner. That’s the subtext: we chase happiness as if it were a prize, but it may be the force doing the chasing, “impel[ling] us through” a life that already resembles a maze.

The line’s real bite is in its refusal to universalize. Colton concedes a shared engine - everyone is moved by the prospect of happiness - while denying the comforting myth of a standard map. “Mazes and meanderings” suggests both confusion and wandering pleasure; happiness doesn’t merely rescue us from disorder, it escorts us deeper into it. The final clause, “but leads none of us by the same route,” punctures moralizing self-help logic before it existed: if there’s no single route, then other people’s “secrets” are often just biographies dressed up as advice.

Context matters. Writing in the late Georgian/early Romantic era, Colton is positioned between Enlightenment confidence in rational systems and a growing fascination with temperament, subjectivity, and the unruly inner life. The sentence performs that tension: structured ceremony versus personal, idiosyncratic paths. It works because it’s both seductive and chastening - happiness is the host of the party, but it won’t hand you the itinerary.