Considering the countless ages that man has lived upon this globe, it seems a strange thing that he has so little learned to acquiesce in the normal conditions of humanity. How large a proportion of the melancholy which is reflected in the poetry of all ages, and which is felt in different degrees in every human soul, is due not to any special or peculiar misfortune, but to things that are common to the whole human race! The inexorable flight of time; the approach of old age and its infirmities; the shadow of death; the mystery that surrounds our being; the contrast between the depth of affection and the transitoriness and uncertainty of life; the spectacle of the broken lives and baffled aspirations and useless labours and misdirected talents and pernicious energies and long-continued delusions that fill the path of human history; the deep sense of vanity and aimlessness that must sometimes come over us as we contemplate a world in which chance is so often stronger than wisdom; in which desert and reward are so widely separated; in which living beings succeed each other in such a vast and bewildering redundance—eating, killing, suffering, and dying for no useful discoverable purpose,—all these things belong to the normal lot or to the inevitable setting of human life. Nor can it be said that science, which has so largely extended our knowledge of the Universe, or civilisation, which has so greatly multiplied our comforts and alleviated our pains, has in any degree diminished the sadness they bring. It seems, indeed, as if the more man is raised above a purely animal existence, and his mental and moral powers are developed, the more this kind of feeling increases.
In few if any periods of the world's history has it been more perceptible in literature than at present. Physical constitution and temperament have a vast and a humiliating power of deepening or lightening it, and the strength or weakness of religious belief largely affects it, yet the best, the strongest, the most believing, and the most prosperous cannot wholly escape it. Sometimes it finds its true expression in the lines of Raleigh:
Even such is time; which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have!
And pays us nought but age and dust,
Which in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
And from which grave and earth and dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.