A Field Guide To Melancholy

Melancholy, said Wordsworth, is a "luxurious gloom of choice". Unlike depression, we choose to be melancholy, paradoxically deriving pleasure from feeling faintly sad. "Melancholy slows things, allows for percolation, facilitates solitude and solace for imagination," says Jacky Bowring in this dispassionate defence of the malady, madness, affectation - melancholy has been called many things over the centuries, but somehow eludes definition.