they stood aloof therefore: but they stayed to hear the rest of the
will, which they now awaited in a state of anxious agitation.

[19] To the English reader it may be necessary to explain, that in the
continental universities, etc., when a succession of prizes is offered,
graduated according to the degrees of merit, the illiptical formula of
'_Accessit_' denotes the second prize; and hence, where only a single
prize is offered, the second degree of merit may properly be expressed
by the term here used.

THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK.

'_To be weak_,' we need not the great archangel's voice to tell us, '_is
to be miserable_.' All weakness is suffering and humiliation, no matter
for its mode or its subject. Beyond all other weakness, therefore, and
by a sad prerogative, as more miserable than what is most miserable in
all, that capital weakness of man which regards the _tenure_ of his
enjoyments and his power to protect, even for a moment, the crown of
flowers--flowers, at the best, how frail and few!--which sometimes
settles upon his haughty brow. There is no end, there never will be an
end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious
heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride--the
everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by
his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the
hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye
which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy
_present_--the hollowness--the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which
all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but
unwearying theme, this impassioned commonplace of humanity, is the
subject in every age of variation without end, from the Poet, the
Rhetorician, the Fabulist, the Moralist, the Divine, and the
Philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans,
labour to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint,
which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and
groans. What is life? Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or
something beyond all beginning--then next a dim lotos of human
consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosom of waters without a
shore--then a few sunny smiles and many tears--a little love and
infinite strife--whisperings from paradise and fierce mockeries from the
anarchy of chaos--dust and ashes--and once more darkness circling r