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 revelation of the radical hopelessness of his position: and I would that there were one even as I, behind this vain show of things! "At all events, the actual conditions of our [183] life being as they are, and the capacity for suffering so large a principle in things--since the only principle, perhaps, to which we may always safely trust is a ready sympathy with the pain one actually sees--it follows that the practical and effective difference between men will lie in their power of insight into those conditions, their power of sympathy.

The future will be with those who have most of it; while for the present, as I persuade myself, those who have much of it, have something to hold by, even in the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution of self, which is, for every one, no less than the dissolution of the world it represents for him.