Sadness, Happiness and Beauty

Because it has some of the colouring of nobility, sadness is also, perhaps, more beautiful than happiness. Philip Larkin’s ‘Money’ (1973) ends:

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

From the comments:

There is the lightness of being, the beautiful sorrow of all things, which you describe; but I don't think it's as detachable from gladness as suggested. Sadness would simply be vacancy if there were no losing, no yearning, no love to breed mourning.

"Happy" is a trite word, yes, often used in trite ways; but the variable dignity of different vocabularies isn't necessarily an insight into human nature. And the idea that happiness is trite skips the question of where value arises from in the first place. It's not transience alone, but our ferociously-felt resistance to this transience, that births art and culture; that sharpens pain into something profound, and makes joy as urgent as any melancholy.

Larkin captured this in his 1968 poem The Trees, which is both a celebration and act of mourning, not to mention a beautiful monument to earth's renewal and art's endurance (for a little while longer than us at least):

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.