must be in this rude place, was
likely to end, and that the moment of taking final account was drawing
very near, a consciousness of waste would come, with half-angry tears
of self-pity, in his great weakness--a blind, outraged, angry feeling
of wasted power, such as he might have experienced himself standing by
the deathbed of another, in condition like his own.

And yet it was the fact, again, that the vision of men and things,
actually revealed to him on his way through the world, had developed,
with a wonderful largeness, the faculties to which it addressed itself,
his general capacity of vision; and in that too was a success, in the
view of certain, very definite, well-considered, undeniable
possibilities. Throughout that elaborate and lifelong education of his
receptive powers, he had ever kept in view the purpose of preparing
himself towards possible further revelation some day--towards some
ampler vision, which [220] should take up into itself and explain this
world's delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till
then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost
epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of
soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to
experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest;
the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers
might choose to write there. And was not this precisely the condition,
the attitude of mind, to which something higher than he, yet akin to
him, would be likely to reveal itself; to which that influence he had
felt now and again like a friendly hand upon his shoulder, amid the
actual obscurities of the world, would be likely to make a further
explanation? Surely, the aim of a true philosophy must lie, not in
futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to the
circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the
maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very
highest achievement; the unclouded and receptive soul quitting the
world finally, with the same fresh wonder with which it had entered the
world still unimpaired, and going on its blind way at last with the
consciousness of some profound enigma in things, as but a pledge of
something further to come. Marius seemed to understand how one might
look back upon life here, and its [221] excellent visions, as but the
portion of a race-course left behind