ignominiously beaten, on the following day tells you he is not in
the least degree disappointed, he might just as trulv assure you,
if you met him walking up streaming with water from a river into
which he had just fallen, that he is not the least wet. No doubt
there is an elasticity in the healthy mind which very soon tides
it over even a severe disappointment; and no doubt the grapes which
are unattainable do sometimes in actual fact turn sour. But let no
man tell us that he has not known the bitterness of disappointment
for at least a brief space, if he have ever from his birth tried
to get anything, great or small, and yet not got it. Failure is
indeed a thing of all degrees, from the most fanciful to the most
weighty: disappointment is a thing of all degrees, from the transient
feeling that worries for a minute, to the great crushing blow that
breaks the mind's spring for ever. Failure is a fact which reaches
from the poor tramp who lies down by the wayside to die, up to the
man who is only made Chief Justice when he wanted the Chancellorship,
or who dies Bishop of London when he had set his heart upon being
Archbishop of Canterbury; or to the Prime Minister, unrivalled in
eloquence, in influence, in genius, with his fair domains and his
proud descent, but whose horse is beaten after being first favourite
for the Derby. Who shall say that either disappointed man felt less
bitterness and weariness of heart than the other? Each was no more
than disappointed; and the keenness of disappointment bears no
proportion to the reality of the value of the object whose loss
caused it. And what endless crowds of human beings, children and
old men, nobles and snobs, rich men and poor, know the bitterness
of disappointment from day to day. It begins from the child shedding
many tears when the toy bought with the long-hoarded pence is broken
the first day it comes home; it goes on to the Duke expecting the
Garter, who sees in the newspaper. at breakfast that the yards of