THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK.


'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 is
most miserable in all, that capital weakness of man which regards the
_tenure_ of his enjoyments and his power to protect, even for a
moment, the crown of flowers--flowers, at the best, how frail and few!
--which sometimes settles upon his haughty brow. There is no end, there
never will be an end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and
the rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of
human pride--the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by
his power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he
inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of
enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the
draperies of the shadowy _present_, the hollowness, the blank
treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life
ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned
common-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation
without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the
moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity
of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this
monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than
those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and formless
vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond all beginning--then next a
dim lotos of human consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosom
of waters without a shore--then a few sunny smiles and many tears--a
little love and infinite strife--whisperings from paradise and fierce