soon as we begin to call ourselves to account for our actions, reason
compels us to fix this aim higher and higher, till we come at last to the
highest end of our existence: and here that longing for the infinite which
is inherent in our being, is baffled by the limits of our finite
existence. All that we do, all that we effect, is vain and perishable;
death stands everywhere in the back ground, and to it every well or ill-
spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so
singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any
grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be
left by all that is most dear to him on earth. There is no bond of love
without a separation, no enjoyment without the grief of losing it. When,
however, we contemplate the relations of our existence to the extreme
limit of possibilities: when we reflect on its entire dependence on a
chain of causes and effects, stretching beyond our ken: when we consider
how weak and helpless, and doomed to struggle against the enormous powers
of nature, and conflicting appetites, we are cast on the shores of an
unknown world, as it were, shipwrecked at our very birth; how we are
subject to all kinds of errors and deceptions, any one of which may
be our ruin; that in our passions we cherish an enemy in our bosoms; how
every moment demands from us, in the name of the most sacred duties, the
sacrifice of our dearest inclinations, and how at one blow we may be
robbed of all that we have acquired with much toil and difficulty; that
with every accession to our stores, the risk of loss is proportionately
increased, and we are only the more exposed to the malice of hostile
fortune: when we think upon all this, every heart which is not dead to
feeling must be overpowered by an inexpressible melancholy, for which
there is no other counter-poise than the consciousness of a vocation
transcending the limits of this earthly life. This is the tragic tone of
mind; and when the thought of the possible issues out of the mind as a
living reality, when this tone pervades and animates a visible