We live poorly enough at the best, even the saintliest of us, and many of us certainly make sad work of our life.

Human life must appear very pathetic, and ofttimes tragical, as the angels look down upon it.

There are almost infinitely fewer wrecks on the great sea where the ships go, than on that other sea of which poets write, where lives with their freightage of immortal hopes and possibilities sail on to their destiny.

We talk sometimes with wonder of what the ocean contains, of the treasures that lie buried far down beneath the waves.

But who shall tell of the treasures that are hidden in the deeper, darker sea of human life, where they have gone down in the sad hours of defeat and failure?
"In dim green depths rot ingot-laden ships, While gold doubloons, that from the drowned hand fell, Lie nestled in the ocean-flowers' bell With love's gemmed rings once kissed by now dead lips; And round some wrought-gold cup the sea-grass whips, And hides lost pearls, near pearls still in their shell Where sea-weed forests fill each ocean dell, And seek dim sunlight with their countless tips.
"So lie the wasted gifts, the long-lost hopes, Beneath the now hushed surface of myself.
In lonelier depths than where the river gropes, They lie deep, deep; but I at times behold, In doubtful glimpses, on some reefy shelf, The gleam of irrecoverable gold." Glimpses of these lost things--these squandered treasures, these wasted possibilities, these pearls and gems of life that have gone down into the sea of our past--we may have when the reefs are left bare by the refluent tides, but glimpses only can we see.