"Ah!" wrote also Madame de Maintenon to her niece, "alas that I cannot give you my experience; that I could only show you the weariness of soul by which the great are devoured--the difficulty which they find in getting through their days! Do you not see how they die of sadness in the midst of that fortune which has been a burden to them? I have been young and beautiful; I have tasted many pleasures; I have been universally beloved. At a more advanced age, I have passed years in the intercourse of talent and wit, and I solemnly protest to you that all conditions leave a frightful void." Coleridge sums up all more wisely. "I have known," he says, "what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than three-score years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you that health is a great blessing,--competence obtained by honorable industry a great blessing,--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian." "We are born and we live so unhappily that the accomplishment of a desire appears to us a falsehood, the realization of hope a deception, as if our sad experience had taught us the bitter lesson that in the world nothing is true but sorrow." "Who ordered toil," says Thackeray, "as the condition of life, ordered weariness, ordered sickness, ordered poverty, failure, success,--to this man a foremost place, to the other a nameless struggle with the crowd; to that a shameful fall, or paralyzed limb, or sudden accident; to each some work upon the ground he stands on, until he is laid beneath it." "Nature," says Pliny, "makes us buy her presents at the price of so many sufferings, that it is dubious whether she deserves most the name of a parent or a step-mother." "Solomon and Job judged the best and spake the truest," thought Pascal, "of human misery; the former the most happy, the latter the most unfortunate of mankind; the one acquainted by long experience with the vanity of pleasure, the other with the reality of affliction and pain."