From the depths of my soul I pity a man or woman who bears about
an irremediable bodily deformity, or the mark of the blood of a
humiliated race. I pity any human being who carries around a body
that he feels to be in any sense an unpleasant one to those whom
he meets. I pity the deformed man, and the maimed man, and the
terribly ugly man, and the black man, and the white man with black
blood in him, because he usually feels that these things bear with
them a certain degree of humiliation. I pity the man who is not
able to stand out in the broad sunlight, with other men, and to
feel that he has as goodly a frame and as fine blood and as
pleasant a presence as the average of those he sees around him. I
do not wonder at all that many of these persons become soured and
embittered and jealous. A sensitive mind, dwelling long upon
misfortunes of this peculiar character, will inevitably become
morbid; and multitudes of humbler men than Lord Byron have cursed
their fate as bitterly as he, and have even lifted their eyes to
blaspheme the Being who made them.

The two instances which I have mentioned show us that there are
two ways of taking misfortunes of this character; and one of them
seems to a good deal better than the other. Between the boy who
ignored the withered leg and the crutch, and the proud poet who
permitted a slight personal deformity to darken his whole life,
there is a distance like that between heaven and earth.

I believe in the law of compensation. Human lot is, on the whole,
well averaged. A man does not possess great gifts of person and of
mind without drawbacks somewhere. Either great duties are imposed
upon him, or great burdens are put upon his shoulders, or great
temptations assail and harass him. Something in his life, at some