Whatever is, is right; as from the hand of one dispensing to every
man according to his desert:

If reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require?

Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits?

That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the whole.

The profit of the whole,--that was sufficient!+

--Links, in a train of thought really generous! of which,
nevertheless, the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see
evil anywhere, might lack, after all, the secret of genuine
cheerfulness. It left in truth a weight upon the spirits; and with
that weight unlifted, there could be no real justification of the
ways of Heaven to man. "Let thine air be cheerful," he had said;
and, with an effort, did himself at times attain to that serenity of
aspect, which surely ought to accompany, as their outward flower and
favour, hopeful assumptions like those. Still, what in Aurelius was
but a passing expression, was with Cornelius (Marius could but note
the contrast) nature, and a veritable physiognomy. With Cornelius,
in fact, it was nothing less than the joy which Dante apprehended in
the blessed spirits of the perfect, the outward semblance of which,
like a reflex of physical light upon human faces from "the land which
is very far off," we may trace from Giotto onward to its consummation
in the work of Raphael--the serenity, the [53] durable cheerfulness,
of those who have been indeed delivered from death, and of which the
utmost degree of that famed "blitheness "of the Greeks had been but a