has reason her being, too, beneath a superior
light, and the shadow cannot affect the calm, unvarying splendour. Far
distant as Marcus Aurelius may be from the traitor, it is still from
the selfsame well that they both draw the holy water that freshens
their soul; and this well is not to be found in the intellect. For,
strangely enough, it is not in our reason that moral life has its
being; and he who would let reason govern his life would be the most
wretched of men. There is not a virtue, a beautiful thought, or a
generous deed, but has most of its roots hidden far away from that
which can be understood or explained. Well might man be proud could he
trace every virtue, and joy, and his whole inward life, to the one
thing he truly possesses, the one thing on which he can depend--in a
word, to his reason. But do what he will, the smallest event that
arrives will quickly convince him that reason is wholly unable to offer
him shelter; for in truth we are beings quite other than merely
reasonable creatures.

44. But if it be not our reason that chooses what suffering shall bring
us, whereby is the choice then made? By the life we have lived till
then, the life that has moulded our soul. Wisdom matures but slowly;
her fruits shall not quickly be gathered. If my life has not been as
that of Paulus Aemilius, there shall be no comfort for me in the
thoughts whereby he was consoled, not though every sage in the world
were to come and repeat them to me. The angels that dry our eyes bear
the form and the features of all we have said and thought--above all,
of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune. When Thomas
Carlyle (a sage, although somewhat morbid) lost the wife he had
tenderly loved, with whom he had lived forty years, then did his sorrow
too, with marvellous exactness, become as had been the bygone life of
his love. And therefore was this sorrow of his majestic and vast;
consoling and torturing alike in the midst of his self-reproach, his
regret, and his tenderness--as might be meditation or prayer on the
shore of a gloomy sea. In the sorrow that floods our heart we have, as
it were, a synthetic presentment of all the days that are gone; and as
these were, so shall our sorrow be poignant, or tender and gentle. If
there be in my life no noble or generous deeds that memory can bring
back to me, then, at the inevitable moment when memory melts into
tears, must these tears, too, be bereft of all that is generous or