so little learned to acquiesce in the
normal conditions of humanity. How large a proportion of the melancholy
which is reflected in the poetry of all ages, and which is felt in
different degrees in every human soul, is due not to any special or
peculiar misfortune, but to things that are common to the whole human
race! The inexorable flight of time; the approach of old age and its
infirmities; the shadow of death; the mystery that surrounds our being;
the contrast between the depth of affection and the transitoriness and
uncertainty of life; the spectacle of the broken lives and baffled
aspirations and useless labours and misdirected talents and pernicious
energies and long-continued delusions that fill the path of human
history; the deep sense of vanity and aimlessness that must sometimes
come over us as we contemplate a world in which chance is so often
stronger than wisdom; in which desert and reward are so widely
separated; in which living beings succeed each other in such a vast and
bewildering redundance--eating, killing, suffering, and dying for no
useful discoverable purpose,--all these things belong to the normal lot
or to the inevitable setting of human life. Nor can it be said that
science, which has so largely extended our knowledge of the Universe, or
civilisation, which has so greatly multiplied our comforts and
alleviated our pains, has in any degree diminished the sadness they
bring. It seems, indeed, as if the more man is raised above a purely
animal existence, and his mental and moral powers are developed, the
more this kind of feeling increases.

In few if any periods of the world's history has it been more
perceptible in literature than at present. Physical constitution and
temperament have a vast and a humiliating power of deepening or
lightening it, and the strength or weakness of religious belief largely
affects it, yet the best, the strongest, the most believing, and the
most prosperous cannot wholly escape it. Sometimes it finds its true
expression in the lines of Raleigh:

Even such is time; which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have!
And pays us nought but age and dust,
Which in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
And from which grave and earth and dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

Sometimes it takes the tone of a lighter melancholy touched with
cynicism: