No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be… - Nathaniel Hawthorne

She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.

His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life span as the measure of an interminable acheivement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it.

"Heaven! What have I done?" exclaimed he. "The vapor, the influence of that brute force,—it has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I have made the very stroke—the fatal stroke—that I have dreaded from the first. It is all over—the toil of months, the object of my life. I am ruined!"
And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in the socket and left the Artist of the Beautiful in darkness.