be that now recalls to our remembrance a few lines of Esop,
the delightful old Fabulist, the Merry and Wise, who set our souls
a-thinking and our hearts a-feeling in boyhood, by moral lessons read to
them in almost every incident befalling in life's common walks--solemn
as Simonides in this his sole surviving elegiac strain?

"What weary woe, what endless strife
Bring'st thou to mortal men, O Life!
Each hour they draw their breath.
Alas! the wretches all despair
To flee the ills they cannot bear,
But through the gates of Death.

And yet how beautiful art Thou
On Earth and Sea--and on the brow
Of starry Heaven! The Night
Sends forth the moon Thee to adorn;
And thee to glorify the Morn
Restores the Orb of Light.

Yet all is full of Pain and Dread;
Bedrench'd in tears for ever shed;
The darkness render'd worse
By gleams of joy--and if by Heaven
A Blessing seemeth to be given,
It changes to a curse."

Even in our paraphrase are not these lines very impressive? In the
original they are much more solemn. They are not querulous, yet full of
lamentation. We see in them not a weak spirit quarrelling with fate, but
a strong spirit subdued by a sense of the conditions on which life has
been given; conditions against which it is vain to contend, to which it
is hard to submit, but which may yet be borne by a will deriving
strength from necessity, and in itself noble by nature. Nor, dark as the
doctrine is, can we say it is false. Intellect and Imagination may from
doleful experiences have too much generalised their inductions, so as to
seem to themselves to have established the Law of Misery as the Law of
Life. But perhaps it is only thus that the Truth can be made available
to man, as it regards the necessity of Endurance. All is not
wretchedness; but the soul seeks to support itself by the belief that it
is really so. Holding that creed, it has no excuse for itself, if at any
time it is stung to madness by misery, or grovels in the dust in a
passion of grief; none, if at any time it delivers itself wholly up,
abandoning itself to joy, and acts as if it trusted to the permanence
of any blessing under the law of Mutability. The Poet, in the hour of
profound emotion, declares that every blessing sent from heaven is a
Nemesis. That oracular response inspires awe. A salutary fear is kept
alive in the foolish by such sayings of the wise. Even t