enerosity
of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or
unkindness--these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and
without which money can buy nothing.

*****

An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to
be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

*****

'Mr. Archer was telling me in some strange land they used to run races
each with a lighted candle, and the art was to keep the candle burning.
Well, now, I thought that was like life; a man's good conscience is the
flame he gets to carry, and if he comes to the winning-post with that
still burning, why, take it how you will, the man is a hero--even if he
was low-born like you and me.'

*****

Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to
last, and in the face of smarting disillusions, we continue to
expect good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so
confidently, that we judge it needless to deserve them.

*****

'Do I, indeed, lack courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of himself. 'Courage,
the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand? Courage, that a
poor private carrying a musket has to spare of; that does not fail a
weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty? I to fail there, I wonder?
But what is courage? The constancy to endure oneself or to see others
suffer? The itch of ill-advised activity: mere shuttle-wittedness, or to
be still and patient? To inquire of the significance of words is to rob
ourselves of what we seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to
stand still is the least heroic.'

*****

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the
only end of life.

*****

But let the man learn to love a woman as far as he is capable of love;
and for this random affection of the body there is substituted a
steady determination, a consent of all his powers and faculties, which
supersedes, adopts, and commands the others. The desire survives,
strengthened, perhaps, but taught obedience, and changed in scope and
character. Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and regrets; for the
man now lives as a whole; his consciousness now moves on uninterrupted
like a river; through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he
remains approvingly conscious of himself.

Now to me, this seems a type of that righteousness which the soul
demands. It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing
tendencies