cs.

But, alas, as the Philosopher declares, "Life itself is a disease; a
working incited by suffering;" action from passion! The memory of that
first state of Freedom and paradisaic Unconsciousness has faded away
into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many
things: with Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do
our best to restore a little Order. Life is, in few instances, and at
rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce
jar of disruptions and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is
no disregarding. Nevertheless, such is still the wish of Nature on our
behalf; in all vital action, her manifest purpose and effort is, that
we should be unconscious of it, and, like the peptic Countryman, never
know that we "have a system." For indeed vital action everywhere is
emphatically a means, not an end; Life is not given us for the mere
sake of Living, but always with an ulterior external Aim: neither is
it on the process, on the means, but rather on the result, that
Nature, in any of her doings, is wont to entrust us with insight and
volition. Boundless as is the domain of man, it is but a small
fractional proportion of it that he rules with Consciousness and by
Forethought: what he can contrive, nay what he can altogether know and
comprehend, is essentially the mechanical, small; the great is ever,
in one sense or other, the vital; it is essentially the mysterious,
and only the surface of it can be understood. But Nature, it might
seem, strives, like a kind mother, to hide from us even this, that she
is a mystery: she will have us rest on her beautiful and awful bosom
as if it were our secure home; on the bottomless boundless Deep,
whereon all human things fearfully and wonderfully swim, she will have
us walk and build, as if the film which supported us there (which any
scratch of a bare bodkin will rend asunder, any sputter of a
pistol-shot instantaneously burn up) were no film, but a solid
rock-foundation. Forever in the neighbourhood of an inevitable Death,
man can forget that he is born to die; of his Life, which, strictly
meditated, contains in it an Immensity and an Eternity, he can
conceive lightly, as of a simple implement wherewith to do day-labour
and earn wages. So cunningly does Nature, the mother of all highest
Art, which only apes her from afar, body forth the Finite from the
Infinite; and guide man safe on his wondrous path, not more by
endowing hi