The Golden Censer Part 23

The grief which she feels nearly crushes her spirit and evokes the sympathies of her neighbors, as well it may. She finds a bitterness within her heart which it is difficult to sweeten into resignation. Why should the blow have singled her as its object? Then, with the lapse of the days, comes a change of the season, and the wonderful climatic effects on both mind and body accompanying them. She wanders into the woods, and the rustling of the leaves beneath her feet betrays her from her dead husband for the first time, and her

CONSCIENCE, THE SOLEMN OFFICER

of her moral nature, suddenly arrests a little girl wandering in the woods in search of a b.u.t.ternut tree which lives like a hermit in the deep of the forest. It is a stray memory of herself in the long ago! It has wandered into her house of grief, and when it falls under the hand of the law she feels great guilt for having harbored it. "O, my poor, dear husband, have I so forgotten you?" she cries in mental sackcloth and ashes. And then the frailty of human reason and action appear before her and appall her. The time flies by. Soon still another season is here, with

A TROOP OF LITTLE TRAITORS, HAPPY MEMORIES,

carrying her "over the hills and far away" into that dim past whence she emerged, all happiness and health. The conscience now has loosened its harsh rule. The memories play in her brain like children on a lawn, and their merry music often drowns the dirges still sadly chanted in her deeper soul. And thus the winter pa.s.ses--not in a whirlwind of grief as did the summer, whose days she never saw, or will not know she saw, until they come again hot and heavy with the a.s.sociation of her bitterness. But it is safe to say her dread of those days will exceed the actual grief they cause her, and she can soon look back upon her sorrow, and say that she has mourned

RATHER NOT ENOUGH THAN TOO MUCH.

If there be joined to this a new a.s.sociation, one that nature and G.o.d have both approved, then there is lifted up the sneer of the world, and again the weakness of woman, the frivolity of humanity, is deplored by those who demand that grief shall co-survive with remembrance. We do not suffer so much as we think we ought to, and yet, foolish and illogical, we call upon our fate in a grand monotony of complaint at the heaviness of our ills. The young man falls in love. His love is not returned. He has believed himself capable of undying and unalterable affection for a maiden. Unselfish, therefore, it must endure, whether she love him or not, for

HAS HE NOT PROCLAIMED IT TO HIS OWN SOUL?

She loves him not! The test is come. He must despise himself as a shallow-hearted hind, or dwell in extacies of adoration over one who will resign herself into the keeping of another, a thing most detestable to this young man. Either horn of the dilemma shows him life, true life.

Not a poem or a dream, but as a range of mountains would form if they were piled down from some other world; first a row of little peaks, then monster heights arising where valleys hid, and valleys forming on the points of peaks.

THIS YOUTHFUL PEAK OF GRIEF,

the young man finds in after years, is but the more substantial bottom of two slopes which rise sublimely toward the zenith of his life. He banishes his false conceptions of the grandeur of the human mind. He banishes an attachment which had not a substantial girder under it, and within a few years his heart is all the broader, gentler and more charitable for his young sorrow. Do not think me underrating the poignancy of ill-requited love. It is no mean sorrow. But no great mind ever was crushed under it. No great mind ever was crushed under any sorrow dealt out to humanity.

TRUE GREATNESS,

after all, lies in true humanity, true understanding of the feebleness of our nature and our capacities. We do not overload an animal, merely because it evinces a willingness to make an effort. We therefore must not overweight our soul with sorrow. We must not nurse our woe. We must not have that grand, conceited idea of our n.o.bility which demands of us a great long future of melancholy; but rather must we nurse our bodies, suspecting our liver if our soul be heavy, and blaming our chamber if our brow be clouded. Then, if a high intelligence wait at the couch of our sick soul, as does faithful woman by an invalid, soon will vanish all the clouds, soon will come a brighter vista in the journey of our lives. We are as G.o.d has made us, weak, miserable and sinful. Let us expect from ourselves conduct becoming a being weak, sinful and miserable. It would seem that this is the secret of those great lives who profit by adversity. They have charity, for they have erred. They have hope, for it has been their true anchor, never failing. They have withal more consistency than have we, though they have

NEVER MADE SUCH HIGH-SOUNDING REQUISITIONS

on their untried natures. Where they have stepped into the stream of their existence in some new fording-place, they have gone with great caution, not with an immature confidence born of naught save foolish audacity. Their river of life is an open water before their pleasant eyes; they prepare not for a flood in the fall, neither do they make ready to pa.s.s over dry-shod when the waters come down in the spring.

Though they have the more mercy, they make the lesser appeals for mercy; though they have the more strength, they pray the oftener for aid.

Sorrow has brought it about. Affliction has stretched their heart-chords

INTO TRUE HARMONY.

"The safe and general antidote against sorrow," says Dr. Johnson, "is employment. It is commonly observed that among soldiers and seamen, though there is much kindness, there is little grief; they see their friend fall without any of that lamentation which is indulged in security and idleness, because they have no leisure to spare from the care of themselves; and whoever shall keep himself equally busy will find himself equally unaffected with irretrievable losses. Time is observed to wear out sorrow, and its effects might doubtless be accelerated by quickening the succession and enlarging the variety of objects."

[Ill.u.s.tration: SORROW.]

THERE IS ANOTHER AND AN UNHAPPY PHASE

of sorrow. "When it is real," says Madame Swetchine, "it is almost as difficult to discover as real poverty. An instinctive delicacy hides the rags of the one and the wounds of the other." "The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue hath it," says the Talmud. "Light griefs do speak," says Seneca, "while sorrow's tongue is bound." "The wringing of the hands and knocking of the breast," says Dr. South, "or the wis.h.i.+ng of one's self unborn: all are but the ceremonies of sorrow, the pomp and ostentation of an effeminate grief, which speak not so much the greatness of the misery as the smallness of the mind."

NOW COMES RELIGION,

s.h.i.+ning down into this Alpine valley of grief, not as the sun of the Alps, but as a continual orb of light; not between a few short hours in a "long, long weary day," but as a constant illumination of the soul, irradiating its beams out upon the countenances of G.o.d's afflicted, and setting them before mankind as a beacon for groping humanity. I know of no more perfect expression of the power of sorrow to chasten the soul and draw it nearer the Maker than is contained in

MARIA LOWELL'S "LAMB IN THE SHEPHERD'S ARMS."

I quote it as giving that lesson which my humble prose would never teach:

1. After our child's untroubled breath Up to the Father took its way, And on our home the shade of death, Like a long twilight, haunting lay,

And friends came round with us to weep Her little spirit's swift remove, This story of the Alpine sheep Was told to us by one we love:

2. They, in the valley's sheltering care, Soon crop the meadow's tender prime, And, when the sod grows brown and bare, The shepherd strives to make them climb To airy shelves of pastures green That hang along the mountain-side, Where gra.s.s and flowers together lean, And down through mist the sunbeams glide.

3. But nought can tempt the timid things That steep and rugged path to try, Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings, And seared below the pastures lie; Till in his arms their lambs he takes Along the dizzy verge to go,-- Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks, They follow on o'er rock and snow;

4. And, in those pastures lifted fair, More dewy soft than lowland mead, The shepherd drops his lowly care, And sheep and lambs together feed.

This parable by Nature breathed Blew on me as the south wind free O'er frozen brooks that float unsheathed From icy thralldom to the sea.

5. A blissful vision, through the night, Would all my happy senses sway, Of the Good Shepherd on the height Or climbing up the starry way, Holding our little lamb asleep; And like the burthen of the sea, Sounded that voice along the deep, Saying, "Arise, and follow me."

POVERTY.

'Tis a little thing To give a cup of water, yet its draught Of cool refreshment, drained by fevered lips, May give a shock of pleasure to the frame More exquisite than when nectarean juice Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.--Talfourd.

Real poverty, it may not be impossible, is to the individual, more of a question when directed to his country than to his actions. In Ireland or Italy, it seems to me, the greatest of individual excellence in sobriety and economy may not s.h.i.+eld the citizen from abject want, which is a terrible thing. But in America the man who is often called "poor" gets as much rest for his body and quite as beneficial food for his stomach as the man whose wealth is the wonder of the world. It is a magnificent land where there is so much food raised and so many clothes made that a man calls himself poor if he have only plenty to eat and wear! Our definition of the word "poverty" is a marvelous corruption of the word. To be poor in the true sense of the word, in this great land, one must have either been sick or criminally negligent. Many a clerk eats as much and dresses as well as Vanderbilt.

What does Vanderbilt do with the great number of millions which he controls?

HE FEEDS AND DRESSES AN ARMY

of about one hundred thousand other men. If he kept his wheat, it would rot. If he kept his clothes, they would pa.s.s into speedy decay. By spending one hundred and fifty million dollars he is enabled to secure services which return an aggregate result of about one hundred and sixty-five million dollars in a year. Men have eaten up his first one hundred and fifty million dollars, but their works are worth one hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and he has fifteen million dollars profit. Suppose the men took his one hundred and fifty million dollars away from him and ate it up and wore it out in a year, doing no work in the mean time. At the end of the year they would begin starving if they relied on him alone, and he would have neither one hundred and fifty million dollars capital nor fifteen million dollars profit.

VIEWED AS IT IS,

Vanderbilt is really only richer than other people to the extent that he can gratify rational desires more than others, and this at once puts him alongside hundreds of thousands who have money enough to purchase everything they can rationally want. In the system of labor for wages, Vanderbilt is only a commander, having the largest force intrusted to his supervision--or paid with his money; the thing is the same. Almost all

THE ENORMOUSLY RICH MEN OF THE WORLD