His virtues walked their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void; And, sure, the Eternal Master found The single talent well employed.
Have I not, Johnson seems to have felt, really done less to soothe misery by my _Dictionary_ and my _Ramblers_ than this obscure labourer in the back lanes of London, of whom, but for my verses, no one would have heard even the name?
A full answer to questions suggested by these thoughts would, perhaps, require an estimate of the relative value of different aims and different functions in life; and, for such an estimate, there are no adequate grounds. In one of Browning's noblest poems, Rabbi Ben Ezra--of whom I must say that he strikes me as being a little too self-complacent--puts a relevant question. "Who," he asks, "shall arbitrate?"
Ten men love what I hate; Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten who, in ears and eyes, Match me; we all surmise, They this thing and I that: whom shall my soul believe?
And he answers or suggests one condition of a satisfactory answer, by saying that we are not to take the coarse judgment of the world, which goes by the work achieved. We must remember--
All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That, weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's account; Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act; Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I would never be, All men ignored in me, That I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.