patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be
found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine
heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some
denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's
vices, might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.




IV


To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven
and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and
hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day
and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;--it may
seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain
consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity.
He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and
all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it
is--so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend,
or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising
joys--this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall
through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must
thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a
friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go,
there need be few illusions left about himself. _Here lies one who meant
well, tried a little, failed much_:--surely that may be his epitaph, of
which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which
calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul