Browning is no such shallow optimist as to believe that all is well with the world, but he does maintain that things are right with the world, for in spite of its present evils it is slowly working its way toward perfection, and in the great scheme of things it may make these evils themselves an instrument to move it toward its ultimate goal.

(In The New Yorker, Apr. 6, 1946) © 4Apr46; B16211. Phyllis McGinley (A); 23Apr73; R551243. Confessions of a reluctant optimist.

[person who is hopeful] optimist, utopian, utopist^. castles in the air, castles in Spain, chateaux en Espagne

'I am myself,' he says in the same Introduction, 'an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerable were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue sky he can.'

Charles Lamb was first employed in the South Sea House, where his brother John a cheerful optimist, a dilettante in art, genial, prosperous, thoroughly selfish, in so far as the family fortunes were concerned an outsideralready held a lucrative post.

I had a dream last night, and already I have begun a new picture of grays and mistsof these strange fogs!" Count Mimo Sykypri was a confirmed optimist.

They would fall grimly silent in the presence of conventional optimists.

The most determined optimist is weighed down by the feeling that it will take more than the ardent prosecution of any one reform, however vital, to produce such a result.

I don't know why you and I shouldn't be enthusiastic optimists concerning wedded life; I can't see why we shouldn't pray for Sacharissa's early marriage.

"But it only costs a dime, which is little enoughthe hired enthusiast, indeed, stationed just outside the entrance, reminds us over and over again that it is only 'the tenth part of a dollar,' and he sometimes adds that 'it will neither make nor break nor set a man up in business.' He is a flagrant optimist in small money matters, ever looking on the bright side.

"The desperate attempt," says Talfourd, "to compel the gentle optimist to speak ill of a mortal creature produced no happier success than the answer, 'Why, I should think, Mr. Lamb, he must have been rather an eccentric character.'

It struck me that only a very hardened optimist could describe it as hopeful.

If one cares for the philosophy of nature and history, of Christianity and other religions, brilliantly expounded by an idealizing, poetic optimist and seer, we commend him to "God in His World" and "The Study of Death.

Solon Denney was to know that some people might be just as good as other people who thought themselves a lot better, and would he please not take some shingles off a man's roof? Solon, ever the incorrigible optimist, said, "Of course I might have waited till he was on the train to give him the money; but don't worry, he'll be ready enough to go when the 'bus starts.

As a puppy she had been an inspired optimist, with legs like strips of elastic clumsily attached to a winged spirit.

They are invincible optimists, the eugenists: it is perhaps a case of a virtue born of necessity.

"You're a nice, quiet, gentlemanly little optimist, and I like you, old fellow," retorted Cullen.

If one cares for the philosophy of nature and history, of Christianity and other religions, brilliantly expounded by an idealizing, poetic optimist and seer, we commend him to "God in His World" and "The Study of Death.

But every age since the golden may be made more or less prosaic by minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which there was always an abundance even in Greece and Italy, the favourite realms of the retrospective optimists.

The end has come with a swiftness that has outdone the hopes of the most sanguine optimists.

Two prominent essayists, Arthur Christopher Benson (1862- ) and Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874- ) are sincere optimists.

that amid it all he remains a sunny optimist, "rejoicing in hope," laboring in the spirit of a conqueror even when the world was exulting in his supposed discomfiture and defeat.

""Well," rejoined our tenacious optimist, "and what of that?

He is a thorough optimist, and is perfectly satisfied with the admirable adaptation of means to ends, whereby it is the function of one animal to be food for another.

And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those unbeatable optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at least the drop of comfort: that if man is a mortal species, with not the slightest prospect of a continuing immortality, not to mention a glorious future and destiny, there are others.