trust and am verily persuaded that,
for the time to come, fortune will prove constant and harmless unto
you; since she has sufficiently wreaked her jealousy at our great
successes on me and mine, and has made the conqueror as marked an
example of human instability as the captive whom he led in triumph,
with this only difference, that Perseus, though conquered, does yet
enjoy his children, while the conqueror Aemilius is deprived of his."

42. This was the Roman fashion of accepting the greatest sorrow that
can befall a man at the moment when sorrow is felt the most keenly--at
the moment of his greatest happiness. And there are many ways of
accepting misfortune--as many, indeed, as there are generous feelings
or thoughts to be found on the earth; and every one of those thoughts,
every one of those feelings, has a magic wand that transforms, on the
threshold, the features and vestments of sorrow. Job would have said,
"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the
Lord"; and Marcus Aurelius perhaps, "If it be no longer allowed me to
love those I loved high above all, it is doubtless that I may learn to
love those whom I love not yet."

43. And let us not think that these are mere empty words wherewith they
console themselves, words that in vain seek to hide the wound that
bleeds but the more for the effort. But if it were so, if empty words
could console, that surely were better than to be bereft of all
consolation. And further, if we have to admit that all this is
illusion, must we not, in mere justice, also admit that illusion is the
solitary thing that the soul can possess; and in the name of what other
illusion shall we venture to rate this illusion so lightly? Ah, when
the night falls and the great sages I speak of go back to their lonely
dwelling, and look on the chairs round the hearth where their children
once were, but never shall be again--then, truly, can they not escape
some part of the sorrow that comes, overwhelming, to those whose
suffering no noble thought chastens. For it were wrong to attribute to
beautiful feeling and thought a virtue they do not possess. There are,
external tears that they cannot restrain; there are holy hours when
wisdom cannot yet console. But, for the last time let us say it,
suffering we cannot avoid for suffering there ever must be; still does
it rest with ourselves to choose what our suffering shall bring. And
let us not think that this choice, which the