They must have their will in everything, or they grow sullen and peevish like spoiled children. Whatever they set their eyes on, or make up their minds to, they must have that instant. They may pay for it hereafter. But that is no matter. They snatch a joy beyond the reach of fate, and consider the present time sacred, inviolable, unaccountable to that hard, churlish, niggard, inexorable taskmaster, the future. Now or never is their motto. They are madly devoted to the play-thing, the ruling passion of the moment. What is to happen to them a week hence is as if it were to happen to them a thousand years hence. They put off the consideration for another day, and their heedless unconcern laughs at it as a fable. Their life is “a cell of ignorance, travelling a-bed;” their existence is ephemeral; their thoughts are insect-winged; their identity expires with the whim, the folly, the passion of the hour.
Nothing but a miracle can rouse such people from their lethargy. It is not to be expected, nor is it even possible in the natural course of things. Pope’s striking exclamation,
That each may fill the circuit mark’d by Heaven!”
