Still, there are certain cases in which this can hardly be so.  A man of sense can bear cheerfully the frustration of the romantic fancies of childhood and youth; but not many are so philosophical in regard to the comparatively reasonable anticipations of more reasonable years.  When you got married at five-and-forty, your hopes were not extravagant.  You knew quite well you were not winning the loveliest of her sex, and indeed you felt you had no right to expect to do so.  You were well aware that in wisdom, knowledge, accomplishment, amiability, you could not reasonably look for more than the average of the race.  But you thought you might reasonably look for that:  and now, alas, alas! you find you have not got it.  How have I pitied a worthy and sensible man, listening to his wife making a fool of herself before a large company of people!  How have I pitied such a one, when I heard his wife talking the most idiotical nonsense; or when I saw her flirting scandalously with a notorious scapegrace; or learned of the large parties which she gave in his absence, to the discredit of her own character and the squandering of his hard-earned gains!  No habit, no philosophy, will ever reconcile a human being of right feeling to such a disappointment as that.  And even a sadder thing than this—­one of the saddest things in life—­is when a man begins to feel that his whole life is a failure; not merely a failure as compared with the vain fancies of youth, but a failure as compared with his sobered convictions of what he ought to have been and what he might have been.  Probably, in a desponding mood, we have all known the feeling; and even when we half knew it was morbid and transient, it was a very painful one.  But painful it must be beyond all names of pain, where it is the abiding, calm, sorrowful conviction of the man’s whole being.  Sore must be the heart of the man of middle age, who often thinks that he is thankful his father is in his grave, and so beyond mourning over his son’s sad loss in life.  And even when the stinging sense of guilt is absent, it is a mournful thing for one to feel that he has, so to speak, missed stays in his earthly voyage, and run upon a mud-bank which he can never get off:  to feel one’s self ingloriously and uselessly stranded, while those who started with us pass by with gay flag and swelling sail.  And all this may be while it is hard to know where to attach blame; it may be when there was nothing worse to complain of than a want of promptitude, resolution, and tact, at the one testing time.  Every one knows the passage in point in Shakspeare.

Disappointment, I have said, is almost sure to be experienced in a greater or less degree, so long as anything remains to be wished or sought.  And a provision is made for the indefinite continuance of disappointment in the lot of even the most successful of men, by the fact in rerum naturu that whenever the wants felt on a lower level are supplied, you advance to a higher platform, where a new crop of