best endowed with faith, hope, sympathy, and the spirit of effort. And
next to them come the great stern, mournful men, like Tacitus, Dante,
Pascal, who, standing as far aloof from the soft poetic dejection
of some of the moods of Shelley or Keats as from the savage fury
of Swift, watch with a prophet's indignation the heedless waste of
faculty and opportunity, the triumph of paltry motive and paltry aim,
as if we were the flies of a summer noon, which do more than any
active malignity to distort the noble lines, and to weaken or to
frustrate the strong and healthy parts, of human nature. For practical
purposes all these complaints of man are of as little avail as Johnson
found the complaint that of the globe so large a space should be
occupied by the uninhabitable ocean, encumbered by naked mountains,
lost under barren sands, scorched by perpetual heat or petrified by
perpetual frost, and so small a space be left for the production of
fruits, the pasture of cattle, and the accommodation of men.

When we have deducted, said Johnson, all the time that is absorbed
in sleep, or appropriated to the other demands of nature, or the
inevitable requirements of social intercourse, all that is torn from
us by violence of disease, or imperceptibly stolen from us by languor,
we may realise of how small a portion of our time we are truly
masters. And the same consideration of the ceaseless and natural
pre-occupations of men in the daily struggle will reconcile the wise
man to all the disappointments, delays, shortcomings of the world,
without shaking the firmness of his own faith, or the intrepidity of
his own purpose.