ound,
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.

These cases, though here spoken of rhetorically, are of daily
occurrence; and, though they may seem few by comparison with the
infinite millions of the species, they are many indeed, if they be
reckoned absolutely for themselves; and throughout the limits of a whole
nation, not a day passes over us but many families are robbed of their
heads, or even swallowed up in ruin themselves, or their course turned
out of the sunny beams into a dark wilderness. Shipwrecks and nightly
conflagrations are sometimes, and especially among some nations,
wholesale calamities; battles yet more so; earthquakes, the famine, the
pestilence, though rarer, are visitations yet wider in their desolation.
Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, ar