cci, nauci, nihili?

In a word, dear sir and friend, in this crowded Old World there is
not the same room that our bold forefathers found for men to walk
about and jostle their neighbors. No; they must sit down like boys
at the form, and work out their tasks, with rounded shoulders and
aching fingers. There has been a pastoral age, and a hunting age,
and a fighting age; now we have arrived at the age sedentary. Men
who sit longest carry all before them,--puny, delicate fellows,
with hands just strong enough to wield a pen, eyes so bleared by
the midnight lamp that they see no joy in that buxom sun (which
draws me forth into the fields, as life draws the living), and
digestive organs worn and macerated by the relentless flagellation
of the brain. Certainly, if this is to be the Reign of Mind, it is
idle to repine, and kick against the pricks; but is it true that
all these qualities of action that are within me are to go for
nothing? If I were rich and happy in mind and circumstance, well
and good; I should shoot, hunt, farm, travel, enjoy life, and snap
my fingers at ambition. If I were so poor and so humbly bred that
I could turn gamekeeper or whipper in, as pauper gentlemen
virtually did of old, well and good too; I should exhaust this
troublesome vitality of mine by nightly battles with poachers, and
leaps over double dikes and stone walls. If I were so depressed of
spirit that I could live without remorse on my father's small
means, and exclaim, with Claudian, "The earth gives me feasts that
cost nothing," well and good too; it were a life to suit a
vegetable, or a very minor poet. But as it is,--here I open
another leaf of my heart to you! To say that, being poor, I want
to make a fortune, is to say that I am an Englishman. To attach
ourselves to a thing positive, belongs to our practical race. Even
in our dreams, if we build castles in the air, they are not Castles
of Indolence,--indeed they have very little of the castle about
them, and look much more like Hoare's Bank, on the east side of
Temple Bar! I desire, then, to make a fortune. But I differ from
my countrymen, first, by desiring only what you rich men would call
but a small fortune; secondly, in wishing that I may not spend my
whole life in that fortune-making. Just see, now, how I am placed.

Under ordinary circumstances, I must begin by taking fro