mockeries from the anarchy of chaos--dust and ashes--and once more
darkness circling round, as if from the beginning, and in this way
rounding or making an island of our fantastic existence,--_that_
is human life; _that_ the inevitable amount of man's laughter and
his tears--of what he suffers and he does--of his motions this way and
that way--to the right or to the left--backwards or forwards--of all
his seeming realities and all his absolute negations--his shadowy
pomps and his pompous shadows--of whatsoever he thinks, finds, makes
or mars, creates or animates, loves, hates, or in dread hope
anticipates;--so it is, so it has been, so it will be, for ever and
ever.

Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast
halls of man's frailty, there are separate and more gloomy chambers of
a frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that
threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable
existence, and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty and
his power have fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is a
frailty, by comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race
seems to have a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, in
which a single week, a day, an hour sweeps away all vestiges and
landmarks of a memorable felicity; in which the ruin travels faster
than the flying showers upon the mountain-side, faster 'than a musician
scatters sounds;' in which 'it was' and 'it is not' are words of the
self-same tongue, in the self-same minute; in which the sun that at
noon beheld all sound and prosperous, long before its setting hour
looks out upon a total wreck, and sometimes upon the total abolition of
any fugitive memorial that there ever had been a vessel to be wrecked,
or a wreck to be obliterated.