en by him
afterwards to send their roots back into the beginnings of life.

Let me note first some of the occasions of his recognition of the
element of pain in things--incidents, now and again, which seemed
suddenly to awake in him the whole force of that sentiment which Goethe
has called the Weltschmerz, and in which the concentrated sorrow of the
world seemed suddenly to lie heavy upon him. A book lay in an old
book-case, of which he cared to remember one picture--a woman sitting,
with hands bound behind her, the dress, the cap, the hair, folded with
a simplicity which touched him strangely, as if not by her own hands,
but with some ambiguous care at the hands of others--Queen Marie
Antoinette, on her way to execution--we all remember David's drawing,
meant merely to make her ridiculous. The face [183] that had been so
high had learned to be mute and resistless; but out of its very
resistlessness, seemed now to call on men to have pity, and forbear;
and he took note of that, as he closed the book, as a thing to look at
again, if he should at any time find himself tempted to be cruel.
Again, he would never quite forget the appeal in the small sister's
face, in the garden under the lilacs, terrified at a spider lighted on
her sleeve. He could trace back to the look then noted a certain mercy
he conceived always for people in fear, even of little things, which
seemed to make him, though but for a moment, capable of almost any
sacrifice of himself. Impressible, susceptible persons, indeed, who had
had their sorrows, lived about him; and this sensibility was due in
part to the tacit influence of their presence, enforcing upon him
habitually the fact that there are those who pass their days, as a
matter of course, in a sort of "going quietly." Most poignantly of all
he could recall, in unfading minutest circumstance, the cry on the
stair, sounding bitterly through the house, and struck into his soul
for ever, of an aged woman, his father's sister, come now to announce
his death in distant India; how it seemed to make the aged woman like a
child again; and, he knew not why, but this fancy was full of pity to
him. There were the little sorrows of the dumb animals too--of the
white angora, with a dark tail like an ermine's, and a face like a
[184] flower, who fell into a lingering sickness, and became quite
delicately human in its valetudinarianism, and came to have a hundred
different expressions of voice--how it grew wo