Happiness Quote by Lucy Larcom

Larcom starts with a concession that feels almost puritan in its sobriety: the world is not a garden, it is a "veil of tears" - a phrase that turns suffering into something you wear, something close to the skin. The genius is that she doesn’t argue with pain or try to out-philosophize it. She accepts grief as atmosphere, then pivots to an instruction that is startlingly willful: "Smile till rainbows span it". Not smile because you are happy; smile until happiness has some chance to arrive.

Written by a 19th-century New England poet with roots in the mill-town working world, the line sits in that era's friction between hardship and moral self-command. There’s a Protestant discipline humming underneath: emotion is real, but behavior is a choice, and choices can become a kind of weather-making. "Till" is the operative word; it implies duration, labor, persistence. The smile is not a cosmetic denial but an act of pressure applied to reality.

The imagery also quietly reframes sorrow as temporary optics. A veil can be lifted; rain is precisely what makes rainbows possible. Larcom’s subtext is less "cheer up" than "treat despair as a medium, not a verdict". In a culture that often reads optimism as naive, her line argues for optimism as craft: not ignorance of the storm, but the practiced refusal to let it define the sky.