evelation of the radical
hopelessness of his position: and I would that there were one even as
I, behind this vain show of things!

"At all events, the actual conditions of our [183] life being as they
are, and the capacity for suffering so large a principle in
things--since the only principle, perhaps, to which we may always
safely trust is a ready sympathy with the pain one actually sees--it
follows that the practical and effective difference between men will
lie in their power of insight into those conditions, their power of
sympathy. The future will be with those who have most of it; while for
the present, as I persuade myself, those who have much of it, have
something to hold by, even in the dissolution of a world, or in that
dissolution of self, which is, for every one, no less than the
dissolution of the world it represents for him. Nearly all of us, I
suppose, have had our moments, in which any effective sympathy for us
on the part of others has seemed impossible; in which our pain has
seemed a stupid outrage upon us, like some overwhelming physical
violence, from which we could take refuge, at best, only in some mere
general sense of goodwill--somewhere in the world perhaps. And then,
to one's surprise, the discovery of that goodwill, if it were only in a
not unfriendly animal, may seem to have explained, to have actually
justified to us, the fact of our pain. There have been occasions,
certainly, when I have felt that if others cared for me as I cared for
them, it would be, not so much a consolation, as an equivalent, for
what one has lost or suffered: a realised profit on the summing up
[184] of one's accounts: a touching of that absolute ground amid all
the changes of phenomena, such as our philosophers have of late
confessed themselves quite unable to discover. In the mere clinging of
human creatures to each other, nay! in one's own solitary self-pity,
amid the effects even of what might appear irredeemable loss, I seem to
touch the eternal. Something in that pitiful contact, something new
and true, fact or apprehension of fact, is educed, which, on a review
of all the perplexities of life, satisfies our moral sense, and removes
that appearance of unkindness in the soul of things themselves, and
assures us that not everything has been in vain.

"And I know not how, but in the thought thus suggested, I seem to take
up, and re-knit myself to, a well-remembered hour, when by some
gracious accident--it