Biographic clinics v 3 1905 Author:George Milbry Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE LIFE TRAGEDY OF JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.1 The reader of Brown's " Life of Symonds " must be strangely insensitive who is not sympathetically... more » grieved by the peculiar and profound pathos of the man's life and suffering. One of the sharp appeals to the attention, coming almost as a shuddering jar, which so often halts one in reading Symonds' own words is shown in this challenge of his of " the injustice of the world ": "I felt at Venice, and I feel sure, very deeply, the injustice of the world, that a man like myself, who has no merits to distinguish him from the rest, should be, through luck of birth and money merely, enabled to play upon the lyre of life so largely to his satisfaction—sea, city, islands, pictures, palaces, there; here, mountains, fine air, forests, homely houses, flowers —and in both situations intellectual enjoyment, responsive human beings, energies of heart and hand." There are few men so highly endowed with both the internal and external gifts of good fortune who have quarreled thus with Fate for its " injustice." There are fewer still who would have believed so naively in the momentary happiness which he caughtout of the monotonous drag of wretchedness which made up his days and nights, his years and his life. The man who could think and feel as this one did may teach the reader the best lessons which come only from the intimate living with another through biographic study. One who loves the swift, clean sword of intellect, polished by knowledge and culture and handled by art and power, cannot pass by this duel between fate and personality. One who himself feels the tragedy that such swordsmanship may bring must have waited for this sad, bright hero. The physician who can see the pathogenic source of the sufferer's hurt should find a...« less