Robert Bridges, ed. (18441930). The Spirit of Man: An Anthology.
1916. From Pulvis et umbra Robert Louis Stevenson (18501894)
POOR1 soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships,
filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent,
savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned
to prey upon his fellow lives: who shd have blamed him had he
been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?
And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect
virtues: sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of
Right and Wrong and the attributes of the Deity .. To touch the
heart of his mystery, we find in him the thought of Duty; the
thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his
God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were
possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he
will not stoop .. It matters not where we look, under what
climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth
of ignorance, burthened with wha