"Sir," said he,
"you are come at a time when all human friendship is useless; what
I suffer cannot be remedied: what I have lost cannot be supplied.
My daughter, my only daughter, from whose tenderness I expected all
the comforts of my age, died last night of a fever. My views, my
purposes, my hopes, are at an end: I am now a lonely being,
disunited from society."
"Sir," said the Prince, "mortality is an event by which a wise man
can never be surprised: we know that death is always near, and it
should therefore always be expected." "Young man," answered the
philosopher, "you speak like one that has never felt the pangs of
separation." "Have you then forgot the precepts," said Rasselas,
"which you so powerfully enforced? Has wisdom no strength to arm
the heart against calamity? Consider that external things are
naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same."
"What comfort," said the mourner, "can truth and reason afford me?
Of what effect are they now, but to tell me that my daughter will
not be restored?"
The Prince, whose humanity would not suffer him to insult misery
with reproof, went away, convinced of the emptiness of rhetorical
sounds, and the inefficacy of polished periods and studied
sentences.
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