It is an awful thought that behind human speech, incapable by its very nature of anything but approximate expression, and distorted by weakness and wilfulness, lies the TRUTH as it is, exact without qualification. * * * * * The long apprenticeship has ended in little or nothing. What I was fifty years ago I am now; certainly no better, with no greater self-control, with no greater magnanimity. How much I might have gained had I taken life as an art I cannot say. * * * * * I have been looking at a cabinet of flies. Hundreds of them, each different, were arranged in order and named. Some I had to examine through a microscope. Their beauty was marvellous, but more marvellous was their variety. The differences, although the type was preserved, seemed inexhaustible, and all reasons for them broke down. If a particular modification is an advantage, why is it confined to one species? Why this range of colour? Why these purely fantastic forms? The only word we can say with certainty is that Nature is infinite and tends to infinite expression. _Verum ego me satis clare ostendisse puto_, _a summa Dei potentia sive infinita natura infinita infinitis modis_, _hoc est_, _omnia necessario effluxisse_, _vel semper eadem necessitate sequi_; _eodem modo_, _ac ex natura trianguli ab æterno et in æternum sequitur ejus tres angulos æquari duobus rectis_. _Quare Dei omnipotentia actu ab æterno fuit et in æternum in eadem actualitate manebit_. * * * * * Johnson is religious through and through, but there are passages in the _Rambler_ and _Idler_ dark as starless, moonless midnight. ‘None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects have eluded their hopes . . . That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greatest part.’ * * * * * There is seldom in life any occasion for great virtues, and we must not be disappointed if it passes without great passion. We must expect to be related to one another by nothing more than ordinary bonds and satisfied if human beings give us pleasure without excitement. * * * * * I have good reason to believe that I am passing on life’s journey through what almost all wayfarers therein have had to pass through, but nobody has told me of it. * * * * * How wonderful is the withdrawal of heat! It silently departs, the iron grows cold, but the heat spreads and lives! ‘Who knows, though he sees the snow-cold blossom shed, If haply the heart that burned within the rose, The spirit in sense, the life of life be dead? If haply the wind that slays with storming snows Be one with the wind that quickens?’