negatives made him only the more sensible of any lack of those literary
qualities that are bound in their full complement to hold themselves at
the disposal of the consummate author--to stand and wait, if they may do
no more.

Men said that he led a _dilettante_ life. They reproached him with the
selflessness that made him somewhat languid. Others, they seemed to
aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at living. So
it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and that many of
the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands. So it was,
too, in this unintended sense; he loved life. How should he not have
loved a life that his living made honourable? How should he not have
loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed,
studious, docile, austere? An amateur man he might have been called,
too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by
the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which
Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness. He had
always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes. His
sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised. When he had
joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon the general
sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure. It was his finest
distinction to desire no differences, no remembrance, but loss among the
innumerable forgotten. And when he suffered, it was with so quick a
nerve and yet so wide an apprehension that the race seemed to suffer in
him. He pitied not himself so tenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for
pain he was then feelingly persuaded. His darkening eyes said in the
extreme hour: 'I have compassion on the multitude.'