'Lastly, there is to be said of all suffering--that it is experience.
I have forgotten in whose life it is to be found, but there is some
man who went out of his way to provide himself with every form of
human misery which he could get at. I do not myself see any occasion
for any man's going out of the way to provide misfortune for himself.
Like an eminent physician, he might stay at home, and find almost
every form of human misery knocking at his door. But still I
understand what this chivalrous inquirer meant, who sought to taste
all suffering for the sake of the experience it would give him.

'There is this admirable commonplace, too, which, from long habit of
being introduced in such discourses, wishes to come in before I
conclude--namely, that infelicities of various kinds belong to the
state here below. Who are we that we should not take our share? See
the slight amount of personal happiness requisite to go on with. In
noisome dungeons, subject to studied tortures, in abject and shifty
poverty, after consummate shame, upon tremendous change of fortune, in
the profoundest desolation of mind and soul, in forced companionship
with all that is unlovely and uncongenial--men, persevering nobly,
live on, and live through all. The mind, like water, passes through
all states, till it shall be united to what it is ever seeking. The
very loneliness of man here is the greatest proof, to my mind, of a
God.'

One of the things that strikes us most in these essays, is the
author's wise moderation of statement, his habit of looking at all
phases of a question, and of saying something appropriate on each. We
believe he makes Ellesmere observe somewhere, that moral essays
commonly require another essay from the opposite point of view to