In themselves events are perfectly mechanical, steady, and fluid, not stopping where we see a goal nor avoiding what we call failures.
I can see my failures at the crises of my life, and I can trace them back to causes, can see wherein a lightly taken determination has later borne bitter fruit.
It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures.
He began at once to fight the tendency, and felt very guilty and very ashamed for indulging it. He prayed for help and at times wept over his failures to break the habit so quickly formed.
But, perhaps, the height of Shakespeare's conception of life is such that, tho he does not satisfy the esthetic demands, he discloses to us a view of life so new and important for men that, in consideration of its importance, all his failures as an artist become imperceptible.
He could not get over the initial failures in his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that he was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually snuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mere glimmers drowned in their own grease.
The stoking difficulties on large ocean-going steamers have become so acute that they now suggest the conclusion that, notwithstanding repeated failures, a really effective mechanical stoker will be so imperatively called for as to enforce the adoption of any reasonably good device.