An entire book of the Hebrew Scriptures is devoted to a deliberate exposition of this philosophy.

In '_the most high and palmy state_' of Athens it was expressed fitfully also as the deepest wisdom of her most triumphant dramatist.[1] And in Shakspeare it appears so constantly, that it must evidently have had for him some directly personal meaning.
This view, however, even by most of those who have held it, has been felt to be really only a half-view in the guise of a whole one.

To Shakspeare, for instance, it was full of a profound terror.

It crushed, and appalled, and touched him; and there was not only implied in it that for us life does mean little, but that by some possibility it might have meant much.

Or else, if the pessimism has been more complete than this, it has probably been adopted as a kind of solemn affectation, or has else been lamented as a form of diseased melancholy.