nce. Besides the dislike he
felt for the young artist, his small pride resented the thought that his
sister, who was to marry a Contarini, should condescend to the defence
of a servant.

Zorzi went his way calmly and spent the day in the laboratory. He was in
a frame of mind in which such speeches as Giovanni's could make but
little impression upon him, sensitive though he naturally was. Really
great sorrows, or great joys or great emotions, make smaller ones almost
impossible for the time. Men of vast ambition, whose deeds are already
moving the world and making history, are sometimes as easily annoyed by
trifles as a nervous woman; but he who knows that what is dearest to him
is slipping from his hold, or has just been taken, is half paralysed in
his sense of outward things. His own mind alone has power to give him a
momentary relief.

Herein lies one of the strongest problems of human nature. We say with
assurance that the mind rules the body, we feel that the spirit in some
way overshadows and includes the mind. Yet if this were really true the
spirit--that is, the will--should have power against bodily pain, but
not against moral suffering except with some help from a higher source.
But it is otherwise. If the will of ordinary human beings could
hypnotise the body against material sensation, the credit due to those
brave believers in all ages who have suffered cruel torments for their
faith would be singularly diminished. If the mind could dominate matter
by ordinary concentration of thought, a bad toothache should have no
effect upon the delicate imagination of the poet, and Napoleon would not
have lost the decisive battle of his life by a fit of indigestion, as
has been asserted.

On the other hand, there was never yet a man of genius, or even of great
talent, who was not aware that the most acute moral anguish can be
momentarily forgotten, as if it did not exist for the time, by
concentrating the mind upon its accustomed and favourite kind of work.
Johnson wrote _Rasselas_ to pay for the funeral of his yet unburied
mother, and Johnson was a man of heart if ever one lived; he could not
have written the book if he had had a headache. Saints and ascetics
without end and of many persuasions have resorted to bodily pain as a
means of deadening the imagination and exalting the will or spirit. Some
great thinkers have been invalids, but in every case their food, work
has been done when they were temporarily free fro