le, and at a certain cost,
rejecting riches--everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere
some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's
ineffectual goodness. Ah! if I could show you this! if I could show you
these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under
every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope,
without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of
virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of
honor, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet
they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom;
they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, the desire of
good is at their heels, 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 further 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 well-doing 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,