Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
'To be weak,' we need not the great archangel's voice to tell us,'is to be miserable.' All weakness is suffering and humiliation,no matter for its mode or its subject. Beyond all other weakness,therefore, and by a sad prerogative, as more miserable than what ismost miserable in all, that capital weakness of man which regards thetenure of his enjoyments and his power to protect, even for amoment, the crown of flowers—flowers, at the best, how frail and few!—which sometimes settles upon his haughty brow. There is no end, therenever will be an end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth andthe rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium ofhuman pride—the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp byhis power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which heinherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures ofenjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath thedraperies of the shadowy present, the hollowness, the blanktreachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of lifeultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassionedcommon-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variationwithout end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, themoralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanityof their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish thismonotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence thanthose very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and formlessvacancy for a beginning, or something beyond all beginning—then next adim lotos of human consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosomof waters without a shore—then a few sunny smiles and many tears—alittle love and infinite strife—whisperings from paradise and fiercemockeries from the anarchy of chaos—dust and ashes—and once moredarkness circling round, as if from the beginning, and in this wayrounding or making an island of our fantastic existence,—thatis human life; that the inevitable amount of man's laughter andhis tears—of what he suffers and he does—of his motions this way andthat way—to the right or to the left—backwards or forwards—of allhis seeming realities and all his absolute negations—his shadowypomps and his pompous shadows—of whatsoever he thinks, finds, makesor mars, creates or animates, loves, hates, or in dread hopeanticipates;—so it is, so it has been, so it will be, for ever andever.
Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vasthalls of man's frailty, there are separate and more gloomy chambers ofa frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty thatthreescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurableexistence, and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty andhis power have fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is afrailty, by comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human raceseems to have a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, inwhich a single week, a day, an hour sweeps away all vestiges andlandmarks of a memorable felicity; in which the ruin travels fasterthan the flying showers upon the mountain-side, faster 'than a musicianscatters sounds;' in which 'it was' and 'it is not' are words of the