, the implacable hunter.

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling:
that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this
inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare
delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however
misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine, received with
screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and still not properly
worked into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther into the
heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man
denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer
like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another
genus: and in him, too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an
unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the
dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming
ant; a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes,
that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here
also, in his ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed the
law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the
ant? Rather this desire of welldoing and this doom of frailty run
through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty
top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of
ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The
whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and
the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the
hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the
thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of
life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive like us--like us are
tempted to grow weary of the struggle--to do well; like us receive at
times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, returns of courage;
and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the
members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of
some reward, some sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at
unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality,
we take to be just, and the prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we
call wicked? It may be, and yet God knows what they should look for.
Even while they look, even while they re