sort of Promethean defiance of the physical world, our powerful and cruel enemy. But Buddhism insists upon it that we know not what are the good things that we pretend to want. Our desires being ignorant, and endlessly changeable, we have no right to hope for success. The moral of their stories is not a protest against the physical evils about us, but a general condemnation of the vain aims that are in us.
The same aimlessness of life is the subject of lament in much of our modern romantic poetry. Here is, for the melancholy romantic poet, the great evil of existence, that we know not what is good. Here is the great disappointment of life, that we have no object in life. Here is the great failure, that we cannot make up our minds to undertake anything. Here is the great emptiness, that we have nothing to fill. And thus the ethical skepticism that has so far beset our path in the present investigation becomes, when we dwell upon it and fully realize its meaning, an ethical pessimism. We shall then illustrate afresh our problem if we consider how this difficulty of the choice of an ideal has affected the search of certain among our modern romantic poets for what they would call the ideal emotion.
II.
Of all the subjects of reflection in romantic poetry, none is more familiar than the question of the meaning and worth of human life as a whole. The first and natural answer of the modern poet to this ques-
