to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I
have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed
and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of
successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated
knowledge and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians
did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied
critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their
work, were obliged to change its economy, and give their second
editions another form, I may surely be contented without the
praise of perfection which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of
solitude what would it avail me?

"I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are
empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."

This seems to me to be the noblest passage that Johnson ever wrote.

Almost all the most magnificent utterances of man are tinged with
sadness. In this they possess a quality that is almost inseparable from
grandeur wherever displayed. No man of sensibility and taste feels it
possible to make jokes himself, or to tolerate them from others when in
the presence of the Falls of Niagara, or a tempest at sea, or when he
views from a peak in the Andes--as I have done--the sun descent into
the Pacific. The greatest pictures painted by man touch the heart rather
than elate it; and genius finds its highest expression not in comedy, but
in tragedy.