ement. What is of finer soul, of finer stuff in things, and
demands delicate touching--to him the delicacy of the little child
represents that: it initiates him into that. There, surely, is a touch
of the secular gold, of a perpetual age of gold. But then again, think
for a moment, with what a hard humour at the nature of things, his
struggle for bare life will go on, if the child should happen to die.
I observed to-day, under one of the archways of the baths, two children
at play, a little seriously--a fair girl and her crippled younger
brother. Two toy chairs and a little table, and sprigs of fir set
upright in the sand for a garden! They played at housekeeping. Well!
the girl thinks her life a perfectly good thing in the service of this
crippled brother. But she will have a jealous lover in time: and the
boy, though his face is not altogether unpleasant, is after all a
hopeless cripple.

"For there is a certain grief in things as they are, in man as he has
come to be, as he certainly is, over and above those griefs of
circumstance which are in a measure removable--some inexplicable
shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of nature itself--death, and
old age as it [182] must needs be, and that watching for their
approach, which makes every stage of life like a dying over and over
again. Almost all death is painful, and in every thing that comes to
an end a touch of death, and therefore of wretched coldness struck home
to one, of remorse, of loss and parting, of outraged attachments.
Given faultless men and women, given a perfect state of society which
should have no need to practise on men's susceptibilities for its own
selfish ends, adding one turn more to the wheel of the great rack for
its own interest or amusement, there would still be this evil in the
world, of a certain necessary sorrow and desolation, felt, just in
proportion to the moral, or nervous perfection men have attained to.
And what we need in the world, over against that, is a certain
permanent and general power of compassion--humanity's standing force of
self-pity--as an elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we
are to live in it at all. I wonder, sometimes, in what way man has
cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing how
every step in the capacity of apprehension his labour has won for him,
from age to age, must needs increase his dejection. It is as if the
increase of knowledge were but an increasing r