the abiding, calm, sorrowful conviction of the man's whole being.
Sore must be the heart of the man of middle age, who often thinks
that he is thankful his father is in his grave, and so beyond mourning
over his son's sad loss in life. And even when the stinging sense
of guilt is absent, it is a mournful thing for one to feel that he
has, so to speak, missed stays in his earthly voyage, and run upon
a mud-bank which he can never get off: to feel one's self ingloriously
and uselessly stranded, while those who started with us pass by
with gay flag and swelling sail. And all this may be while it is
hard to know where to attach blame; it may be when there was nothing
worse to complain of than a want of promptitude, resolution, and
tact, at the one testing time. Every one knows the passage in point
in Shakspeare.

Disappointment, I have said, is almost sure to be experienced in
a greater or less degree, so long as anything remains to be wished
or sought. And a provision is made for the indefinite continuance
of disappointment in the lot of even the most successful of men,
by the fact in rerum naturu that whenever the wants felt on a lower
level are supplied, you advance to a higher platform, where a new
crop of wants is felt. Till the lower wants are supplied you never
feel the higher; and accordingly people who pass through life
barely succeeding in gaining the supply of the lower wants, will
hardly be got to believe that the higher wants are ever really felt
at all. A man who is labouring anxiously to earn food and shelter
for his children--who has no farther worldly end, and who thinks he
would be perfectly happy if he could only be assured on New Year's
day that he would never fail in earning these until the thirty-first
of December, will hardly believe you when you tell him that the
Marquis at the castle is now utterly miserable because the King would