S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Perfection
Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off—and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously “measure by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality” in this poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole matter goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall perpendicular—mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices him, and he, like a good bricklayer, who must have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet, if he sway too much from the perpendicular—above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand—such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has forgotten himself; but the law of gravitation does not forget to act on him: he and his wall rush down into a confused welter of ruins!