FLOWERS AND FRUIT.
FLOWERS AND FRUIT.
Sympathy.
When we feel a thing ourselves, we can see very quick the same in others.
Self-deception.
When a finely constituted nature wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never embraced, undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts, and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one’s self is an essential preliminary to imposing on others. The man first argues himself down, and then he is ready to put the whole weight of his nature to deceiving others.
Soul-communion.
Perhaps it is so, that souls once intimately related have ever after this a strange power of affecting each other,—a power that neither absence nor death can annul. How else can we interpret those mysterious hours inwhich the power of departed love seems to overshadow us, making our souls vital with such longings, with such wild throbbings, with such unutterable sighings, that a little more might burst the mortal bond? Is it not deep calling unto deep? the free soul singing outside the cage to her mate beating against the bars within?
Soul-absorption.
The greatest moral effects are like those of music,—not wrought out by sharp-sided intellectual propositions, but melted in by a divine fusion, by words that have mysterious, indefinite fulness of meaning, made living by sweet voices, which seem to be the out-throbbings of angelic hearts. So one verse in the Bible read by a mother in some hour of tender prayer has a significance deeper and higher than the most elaborate of sermons, the most acute of arguments.
Restrictions of the body on the soul.
Scarcely conscious, she lay in that dim, clairvoyant state, when the half-sleep of the outward senses permits a delicious dewy clearness of the soul, that perfect ethereal rest and freshness of the faculties, comparable only to what we imagine of the spiritual state,—season of celestial enchantment, in which the heavy weight “of all this unintelligible world” drops off, and the soul, divinely charmed, nestles like a wind-tossed bird in the protecting bosom of the One All-perfect, All-beautiful. What visions then come to the inner eye have often nowords corresponding in mortal vocabularies. The poet, the artist, and the prophet in such hours become possessed of divine certainties which all their lives they struggle, with pencil or song or burning words, to make evident to their fellows. The world around wonders, but they are unsatisfied, because they have seen the glory and know how inadequate the copy.
Courage in the truth.
Half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly and in a spirit of love.
Miss Prissy’s motto.
“Tho’ I can’t say I’m lone either, because nobody need say that, so long as there’s folks to be done for.”
Blessednessvs.happiness.
We could not afford to have it always night,—and we must think that the broad, gay morning-light, when meadowlark and robin and bobolink are singing in chorus with a thousand insects and the waving of a thousand breezes, is on the whole the most in accordance with the average wants of those who have a material life to live and material work to do. But then we reverence that clear-obscure of midnight, when everything is still and dewy;—then sing the nightingales, which cannot be heard by day; then shine the mysterious stars. So when all earthly voices are hushed in the soul, all earthly lights darkened, music and color float in from a higher sphere.... Bywhat name shall we call this beautiful twilight, this night of the soul, so starry with heavenly mysteries?Nothappiness, but blessedness. They who have it walk among men as “sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing, as poor, yet making many rich,—as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.”
Laws of prayer.
Is it not possible that He who made the world may have established laws for prayer as invariable as those for the sowing of seed and raising of grain? Is it not as legitimate a subject of inquiry, when petitions are not answered, which of these laws has been neglected?
Influence of the invisible.
Woman feels; man reasons.
No real artist or philosopher ever lived who has not at some hours risen to the height of utter self-abnegation for the glory of the invisible. There have been painters who would have been crucified to demonstrate the action of a muscle,—chemists who would gladly have melted themselves and all humanity in their crucible, if so a new discovery might arise out of its fumes. Even persons of mere artistic sensibility are at times raised by music, painting, or poetry, to a momentary trance of self-oblivion, in which they would offer their whole being before the shrine of an invisible loveliness.... But where theorists and philosophers tread with sublime assurance, woman often follows with bleedingfootsteps;—women are always turning from the abstract to the individual, and feeling where the philosopher only thinks.
Love a sacrament.
True love is a natural sacrament; and if ever a young man thanks God for having saved what is noble and manly in his soul, it is when he thinks of offering it to the woman he loves.
God’s tests.
“Mr. Scudder used to say that it took great affliction to bring his mind to that place,” said Mrs. Katy. “He used to say that an old paper-maker told him once, that paper that was shaken only one way in the making would tear across the other, and the best paper had to be shaken every way; and so he said we couldn’t tell till we had been turned and shaken and tried every way, where we should tear.”
Unconscious heart-thrusts.
So we go,—so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk! We drop out a common piece of news,—“Mr. So-and-so is dead,”—“Miss Such-a-one is married,”—“Such a ship has sailed,”—and lo, on our right hand or our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently,—gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. And this—God help us!—is what we call living!
Repression.
It was not pride, nor sternness, but a sort of habitual shamefacedness thatkept far back in each soul those feelings which are the most beautiful in their outcome; but after a while the habit became so fixed a nature that a caressing or affectionate expression could not have passed the lips of one to another without a painful awkwardness. Love was understood, once for all, to be the basis on which their life was built. Once for all, they loved each other, and after that, the less said, the better. It had cost the woman’s heart of Mrs. Marvin some pangs, in the earlier part of her wedlock, to accept of thisonce for allin place of those daily outgushings which every woman desires should be like God’s loving-kindnesses, “new every morning;” but hers, too, was a nature strongly inclining inward, and, after a few tremulous movements, the needle of her soul settled, and her life-lot was accepted,—not as what she would like or could conceive, but as a reasonable and good one. Life was a picture painted in low, cool tones, but in perfect keeping; and though another and brighter style might have pleased better, she did not quarrel with this.
Winged and walking spirits.
There are in this world two kinds of natures,—those that have wings, and those that have feet,—the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive and poetic. Natures that must always walk find many a bog, many a thicket, many a tangled brake, which God’s happy little winged birds flit over by onenoiseless flight. Nay, when a man has toiled till his feet weigh too heavily with the mud of earth to enable him to walk another step, these little birds will often cleave the air in a right line towards the bosom of God, and show the way where he could never have found it.
Unity in prayer.
The truly good are of one language in prayer. Whatever lines or angles of thought may separate them in other hours,when they pray in extremity, all good men pray alike. The Emperor Charles V. and Martin Luther, two great generals of opposite faiths, breathed out their dying struggles in the self-same words.
Sympathy through sorrow.
As well might those on the hither side of mortality instruct the souls gone beyond the veil, as souls outside a great affliction guide those who are struggling in it. That is a mighty baptism, and only Christ can go down with us into those waters.
Agony of uncertainty.
Against an uncertainty, who can brace the soul? We put all our forces of faith and prayer against it, and it goes down just as a buoy sinks in the water, and the next moment it is up again. The soul fatigues itself with efforts which come and go in waves; and when with laborious care it has adjusted all things in the light of hope, back flows the tide and sweeps all away. In such struggles life spends itself fast; an inward wound does notcarry one deathward more surely than this worst wound of the soul. God has made us so mercifully that there is nocertainty, however dreadful, to which life-forces do not in time adjust themselves; but to uncertainty there is no possible adjustment.
Candace’s theology.
“’Cause, as we’s got to live in dis yer world, it’s quite clar de Lord must ha’ fixed it so wecan; an’ ef tings was as some folks suppose, why, we couldn’t live, and dar wouldn’t be no sense in anyting dat goes on.”
Death in life.
So we go, dear reader,—so long as we have a body and a soul. For worlds must mingle,—the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial, wreathing in and out, like the grotesque carvings on a gothic shrine; only, did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial, since the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred. Have not ribbons, cast-off flowers, soiled bits of gauze, trivial, trashy fragments of millinery, sometimes had an awful meaning, a deadly power, when they belonged to one who should wear them no more, and whose beautiful form, frail and crushed as they, is a hidden and vanished thing for all time? For so sacred and individual is a human being, that, of all the million-peopled earth, no one form ever restores another. The mould of each mortal type is broken at the grave; and never, never, though you look through all the faces on earth,shall the exact form you mourn ever meet your eyes again! You are living your daily life among trifles that one death-stroke may make relics. One false step, one luckless accident, an obstacle on the track of a train, the tangling of a cord in shifting a sail, and the penknife, the pen, the papers, the trivial articles of dress and clothing, which to-day you toss idly and jestingly from hand to hand, may become dread memorials of that awful tragedy whose deep abyss ever underlies our common life.
Memory.
For one flower laid on the shrine which we keep in our hearts for the dead is worth more than any gift to our living selves.
Control of the thoughts.
“How could you help it,mignonne? Can you stop your thinking?”
Mary said, after a moment’s blush,—“I cantry!”
Minor modulations.
Behind every scale of music, the gayest and cheeriest, the grandest, the most triumphant, lies its dark relative minor; the notes are the same, but the change of a semitone changes all to gloom;—all our gayest hours are tunes, that have a modulation into these dreary keys ever possible; at any moment the keynote may be struck.
The ideal and the practical.
Nothing is more striking, in the light and shadow of the human drama, thanto compare the inner life and thoughts of elevated and silent natures with the thoughts and plans which those by whom they are surrounded have of and for them. Little thought Mary of any of the speculations that busied the friendly head of Miss Prissy, or that lay in the provident forecastings of her prudent mother.
Perfect faith.
“Indeed, I am afraid something must be wrong with me. I cannot have any fears,—I never could; I try sometimes, but the thought of God’s goodness comes all around me, and I’m so happy before I think of it.”
Undercurrent.
All the little, mean work of our nature is generally done in a small dark closet just a little back of the subject we are talking about, on which subject we suppose ourselves of course to be thinking;—of course, we are thinking of it; how else could we talk about it?
The divine ideal.
As to every leaf and every flower there is an ideal to which the growth of the plant is constantly urging, so is there an ideal to every human being,—a perfect form in which it might appear, were every defect removed, and every characteristic excellence stimulated to the highest point. Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false imagining, an unreal character, but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,—loves,not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be.
Responsibility.
To feel the immortality of a beloved soul hanging upon us, to feel that its only communications with Heaven must be through us, is the most solemn and touching thought that can pervade a mind.
Developing power of love.
What makes the love of a great mind something fearful in its inception is, that it is often the unsealing of a hitherto undeveloped portion of a large and powerful being.
Unsuspected influence.
It is said that if a grapevine be planted in the neighborhood of a well, its roots, running silently underground, wreathe themselves in a network round the cold, clear waters, and the vine’s putting on outward greenness and unwonted clusters and fruit is all that tells where every root and fibre of its being has been silently stealing. So, those loves are most fatal, most absorbing, in which, with unheeded quietness, every thought and fibre of our life twines gradually around some human soul, to us the unsuspected wellspring of our being. Fearful it is, because so often the vine must be uprooted, and all its fibres wrenched away; but till the hour of discovery comes, how is it transfigured by a new and beautiful life!
Personal magnetism.
Gradually an expression of intense interest and deep concern spread over the listeners; it was the magnetism of a strong mind, which held them for a time under the shadow of his own awful sense of God’s almighty justice.
It is said that a little child once described his appearance in the pulpit by saying, “I saw God there, and I was afraid.”
Soul-growth.
There is a ladder to heaven whose base God has placed in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes, till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the image of the divine. At the very top of this ladder, at the threshold of Paradise, blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade where the soul knows self no more, having learned, through a long experience of devotion, how blest it is to lose herself in that eternal Love and Beauty, of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but the dim type, the distant shadow.
Discipline.
It is said that gardeners sometimes, when they would bring a rose to richer flowering, deprive it, for a time, of light and moisture. Silent and dark it stands, dropping one faded leaf after another, and seeming to go down patiently to death. But when every leaf is dropped, and the plant stands stripped to theuttermost, a new life is even then working in the buds, from which shall spring a tender foliage, and a brighter wealth of flowers. So, often in celestial gardening, every leaf of earthly joy must drop, before a new and divine bloom visits the soul.
Idealizing power of love.
In a refined and exalted nature, it is very seldom that the feeling of love, when once thoroughly aroused, bears any sort of relation to the reality of the object. It is commonly an enkindling of the whole power of the soul’s love for whatever she considers highest and fairest; it is, in fact, the love of something divine and unearthly, which, by a sort of illusion, connects itself with a personality. Properly speaking, there is but one true, eternal object of all that the mind conceives, in this trance of its exaltation. Disenchantment must come, of course; and in a love which terminates in happy marriage, there is a tender and gracious process by which, without shock or violence, the ideal is gradually sunk in the real, which, though found faulty and earthly, is still ever tenderly remembered as it seemed under the morning light of that enchantment.
Moral earnestness.
It is noticeable, in every battle of opinion, that honest, sincere, moral earnestnesshas a certain advantage over mere intellectual cleverness.
Struggling for higher things.
Plato says that we all once had wings, and that they will tend to grow out in us, and that our burnings and aspirations for higher things are like the teething pangs of children. We are trying to cut our wings. Let us not despise these teething seasons. Though the wings do not become apparent, they may be starting under many a rough coat and on many a clumsy pair of shoulders.
Faith, not sight.
“I often think,” said Harry, listening for a moment, “that no one can pronounce on what this life has been to him until he has passed entirely through it, and turns around, and surveys it from the other world. I think then that we shall see everything in its true proportions; but, till then, we must walk by faith, not by sight,—faith that God loves us, faith that our Savior is always near us, and that all things are working together for good.”
God’s cordials.
But certain it is that there is a very near way to God’s heart, and so to the great heart of all comfort, that sometimes opens like a shaft of light between heaven and the soul, in hours when everything earthly falls away from us. A quaint old writer has said, “God keeps his choicest cordials for the time of our deepest faintings.” And so it came to pass that,as this poor woman closed her eyes and prayed earnestly, there fell a strange clearness into her soul, which calmed every fear, and hushed the voice of every passion, and she lay for a season as if entranced. Words of Holy Writ, heard years ago in church readings, in the hours of unconscious girlhood, now seemed to come back, borne in with a loving power on her soul.
Silent companionship.
The kind of silence which gives a sense of companionship.
Moral inheritance.
Esther was one of those intense, silent, repressed women, that have been a frequent outgrowth of New England society. Moral traits, like physical ones, often intensify themselves in course of descent, so that the child of a long line of pious ancestry may sometimes suffer from too fine a moral fibre, and become a victim to a species of morbidspiritual ideality.
Esther looked to me, from the first, less like a warm, breathing, impulsive woman, less like ordinary flesh and blood, than some half-spiritual organization, every particle of which was a thought.
Holiness of age.
Among all the loves that man has to woman, there is none so sacred and saint-like as that toward these dear, white-haired angels, who seem to form the connecting link between heaven and earth, who have lived to get the victory over every sin and every sorrow, andlive perpetually on the banks of the dark river, in that bright, calm land of Beulah, where angels daily walk to and fro, and sounds of celestial music are heard across the water.
Such have no longer personal cares, or griefs, or sorrows. The tears of life have all been shed, and therefore they have hearts at leisure to attend to every one else. Even the sweet guileless childishness that comes on in this period has a sacred dignity; it is a seal of fitness for that heavenly kingdom, which whosoever shall not receive as a little child shall not enter therein.
Unity in conflict.
Has there ever been a step in human progress that has not been taken against the prayers of some good soul, and been washed by tears sincerely and despondently shed? But, for all this, is there not a true unity of the faith in all good hearts? And when they have risen a little above the mists of earth, may not both sides—the conqueror and the conquered—agree that God hath given them the victory in advancing the cause of truth and goodness?
Growth from within.
It has been the experience of my life that it is your quiet people who, above all other children of men, are set in their ways and intense in their opinions. Their very reserve and silence are a fortification behind which all their peculiarities grow and thrive at their leisure, without encountering those blows and shocks which materially modify moreoutspoken natures. It is owing to the peculiar power of quietness that one sometimes sees characters fashioning themselves in a manner the least to be expected from the circumstances and associates which surround them. As a fair white lily grows up out of the bed of meadow muck, and without note or comment rejects all in the soil that is alien from her being, and goes on fashioning her own silver cup side by side with weeds that are drawing coarser nutriment from the soil, so we often see a refined and gentle nature, by some singular internal force, unfolding itself by its own laws, and confirming itself in its own beliefs, as wholly different from all that surround it as is the lily from the ragweed. There are persons, in fact, who seem to grow almost wholly from within, and on whom the teachings, the doctrine, and the opinions of those around them, produce little or no impression.
Amusements.
It may be set down, I think, as a general axiom, that people feel the need of amusements less and less, precisely in proportion as they have solid reasons for being happy.
Repression.
Perhaps my readers may have turned over a great, flat stone some time in their rural rambles, and found under it little clovers, and tufts of grass pressed to earth, flat, white, and bloodless, but still growing, stretching, creeping towards the edges, where their plant-instinct tells them there is light and deliverance.The kind of life that the little Tina led, under the care of Miss Asphyxia, resembled that of these poor clovers. It was all shut down and repressed, but growing still.
Sympathy.
I felt a cleaving of spirit to him that I had never felt towards any human being before,—a certainty that something had come to me in him that I had always been wanting,—and I was too glad for speech.
Soul-relation.
Is it not true that, as we grow older, the relationship of souls will make itself felt?
Life renewed.
No dreamland on earth can be more unearthly in its beauty and glory than the St. Johns in April. Tourists, for the most part, see it only in winter, when half its gorgeous forests stand bare of leaves, and go home, never dreaming what it would be like in its resurrection robes. So do we, in our darkness, judge the shores of the river of this mortal life up which we sail, ofttimes disappointed and complaining. We are seeing all things in winter, and not as they will be when God shall wipe away all tears, and bring about the new heavens and new earth of which every spring is a symbol and a prophecy. The flowers and leaves of last year vanish for a season, but they come back fresher and fairer than ever.
A lesson in faith.
On either side, perched on a tall, dry, last year’s coffee-bean-stalk, sit “papa” and “mamma,” chattering and scolding, exhorting and coaxing. The little ones run from side to side, and say in plaintive squeaks, “I can’t,” “I daren’t,” as plain as birds can say it. There,—now they spread their little wings; and oh, joy! they find to their delight that they do not fall; they exult in the possession of a new-born sense of existence. As we look at this pantomime, graver thoughts come over us. And we think how poor, timid, little souls moan, and hang back, and tremble, when the time comes to leave this nest of earth, and trust themselves to the free air of the world they were made for. As the little bird’s moans and cries end in delight and rapture in finding himself in a new, glorious, free life; so, just beyond the dark steps of death, will come a buoyant, exulting sense of new existence.
Discipline.
The ship, built on one element, but designed to have its life in another, seemed an image of the soul, formed and fashioned with many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but finding its true element only when it sails out into the ocean of eternity.
Heimweh.
But there are souls sent into this world who seem to have always mysterious affinitiesfor the invisible and the unknown—who see the face of everything beautiful through a thin veil of mystery and sadness. The Germans call this yearning of spirit “homesickness”—the dim remembrances of a spirit once affiliated to some higher sphere, of whose lost brightness all things fair are the vague reminders.
Limitation.
But Miss Emily knew no more of the deeper parts of her brother’s nature than a little bird that dips its beak into the sunny waters of some spring knows of its depths of coldness and shadow.
Learning to love.
The fact was, as the reader may perceive, that Miss Roxy had been thawed into an unusual attachment for the little Mara, and this affection was beginning to spread a warming element through her whole being. It was as if a rough granite rock had suddenly awakened to a passionate consciousness of the beauty of some fluttering white anemone that nestled in its cleft, and felt warm thrills running through all its veins at every tender motion and shadow.
Fitful persons.
Such people are not very wholesome companions for those who are sensitively organized and predisposed to self-sacrificing love. They keep the heart in a perpetual freeze and thaw, which, like the American northern climate, is so particularly fatal to plants of a delicatehabit. They could live through the hot summer and the cold winter, but they cannot endure the three or four months when it freezes one day and melts the next,—when all the buds are started out by a week of genial sunshine, and then frozen for a fortnight. These fitful persons are of all others most engrossing, because you are always sure in their good moods that they are just going to be angels,—an expectation which no number of disappointments seems finally to do away.
Love—a test.
Nothing so much shows what a human being is in moral advancement as the quality of his love.
Altruistic faith.
The faults and mistakes of us poor human beings are as often perpetuated by despair as by any other one thing. Have we not all been burdened by a consciousness of faults that we were slow to correct because we felt discouraged? Have we not been sensible of a real help sometimes from the presence of a friend who thought well of us, believed in us, set our wisdom in the best light, and put our faults in the background?
Expression of love.
“Dispute your mother’s hateful dogma, that love is to be taken for grantedwithout daily proof between lovers; cry down latent caloric in the market; insist that the mere fact of being a wife is not enough,—that the words spoken once, years ago, are not enough,—that love needs new leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm-tree, and new branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers at the root to cover the ground.”
Latent caloric.
I remember my school-day speculations over an old “Chemistry” I used to study as a text-book, which informed me that a substance called Caloric exists in all bodies. In some it exists in a latent state; it is there, but it affects neither the senses nor the thermometer. Certain causes develop it, when it raises the mercury and warms the hands. I remember the awe and wonder with which, even then, I reflected on the vast amount of blind, deaf, and dumb comfort which Nature had thus stowed away. How mysterious it seemed to me that poor families every winter should be shivering, freezing, and catching cold, when Nature had all this latent caloric locked up in her store-closet,—when it was all around them, in everything they touched and handled!
In the spiritual world there is an exact analogy to this. There is a great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human hearts, dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power, till set free by expression.
Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day just beforea snowstorm, sit at work in a room that was judiciously warmed by an exact thermometer? You do not freeze, but you shiver; your fingers do not become numb with cold, but you have all the while an uneasy craving for more positive warmth. You look at the empty grate, walk mechanically towards it, and, suddenly awaking, shiver to see that there is nothing there. You long for a shawl or a cloak; you draw yourself within yourself; you consult the thermometer, and are vexed to find that there is nothing there to be complained of,—it is standing most provokingly at the exact temperature that all the good books and good doctors pronounce to be the proper thing,—the golden mean of health; and yet perversely you shiver, and feel as if the face of an open fire would be to you as the smile of an angel.
Such a life-long chill, such an habitual shiver, is the lot of many natures, which are not warm, when all ordinary rules tell them they ought to be warm,—whose life is cold and barren and meagre,—which never see the blaze of an open fire.
Regret.
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. “She never knew how I loved her.” “He never knew what he was to me.” “I always meant to make more of our friendship.” “I never knew what he was to me till he was gone.” Such words are the poisoned arrows which cruel Deathshoots backward at us from the door of the sepulchre.
How much more we might make of our family life, of our friendships, if every secret thought of love blossomed into a deed! We are not now speaking of personal caresses. These may or may not be the best language of affection. Many are endowed with a delicacy, a fastidiousness of physical organization, which shrinks away from too much of these, repelled and overpowered. But there are words and looks and little observances, thoughtfulnesses, watchful little attentions, which speak of love, which make it manifest, and there is scarce a family that might not be richer in heart-wealth for more of them.
First principles of home-making.
In this art of home-making I have set down in my mind certain first principles, like the axioms of Euclid, and the first is,—
No home is possible without love.
All business marriages and marriages of convenience, all mere culinary marriages and marriages of mere animal passion, make the creation of a true home impossible in the outset. Love is the jewelled foundation of this New Jerusalem descending from God out of heaven, and takes as many bright forms as the amethyst, topaz, and sapphire of that mysterious vision.In this range of creative art all things are possible to him that loveth, but without love nothing is possible.
Conversation.
Realconversation presupposes intimate acquaintance. People must see each other often enough to wear off the rough bark and outside rind of commonplaces and conventionalities in which their real ideas are enwrapped, and give forth without reserve their innermost and best feelings.
Saintliness.
What makes saintliness, in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic. To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of every-day life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
Teachings of suffering.
There is a certain amount of suffering which must follow the rending of the great cords of life, suffering which is natural and inevitable: it cannot be argued down; it cannot be stilled; it can no more be soothed by any effort of faith and reason than the pain of a fractured limb, or the agony of fire on the living flesh. All that we can do is to braceourselves to bear it, calling on God, as the martyrs did in the fire, and resigning ourselves to let it burn on. We must be willing to suffer, since God so wills. There are just so many waves to go over us, just so many arrows of stinging thought to be shot into our soul, just so many faintings and sinkings and revivings only to suffer again, belonging to and inherent in our portion of sorrow; and there is a work of healing that God has placed in the hands of Time alone.
Time heals all things at last; yet it depends much on us in our sufferings, whether Time shall send us forth healed, indeed, but maimed and crippled and callous, or whether, looking to the great Physician of sorrows, and coworking with him, we come forth stronger and fairer even for our wounds.
Help in sorrow.
One soul redeemed will do more to lift the burden of sorrow than all the blandishments and diversions of art, all the alleviations of luxury, all the sympathy of friends.
Affinity of opposites.
From that time a friendship commenced between the two which was a beautiful illustration of the affinities of opposites. It was like a friendship between morning and evening,—all freshness and sunshine on one side, and all gentleness and peace on the other.
Superiority.
It is one mark of a superior mind to understand and be influenced by the superiority of others.
Sympathy.
The same quickness which makes a mind buoyant in gladness often makes it gentlest and most sympathetic in sorrow.
God’s sympathy.
It is well for man that there is one Being who sees the suffering heartas it is, and not as it manifests itself through the repellences of outward infirmity, and who, perhaps, feels more for the stern and wayward than for those whose gentler feelings win for them human sympathy.
Influence.
He had traced her, even as a hidden streamlet may be traced, by the freshness, the verdure of heart, which her deeds of kindness had left wherever she had passed.
Capacity of feeling.
A very unnecessary and uncomfortable capacity offeeling, which, like a refined ear for music, is undesirable, because, in this world, one meets with discord ninety-nine times where one meets with harmony once.
Heart-wisdomvs.worldly wisdom.
How very contrary is the obstinate estimate of the heart to the rational estimate of worldly wisdom! Are there not some who can remember when one word, one look, or even the withholding of a word, hasdrawn their heart more to a person than all the substantial favors in the world? By ordinary acceptation, substantial kindness respects the necessaries of animal existence, while those wants which are peculiar to mind, and will exist with it forever, by equally correct classification, are designated as sentimental ones, the supply of which, though it will excite more gratitude in fact, ought not to in theory.
Living together.
From that time Ilivedwith her—and there are some persons who can make the wordlivesignify much more than it commonly does—and she wrought on my character all those miracles which benevolent genius can work. She quieted my heart, directed my feelings, unfolded my mind, and educated me, not harshly or by force, but as the blessed sunshine educates the flower, into full and perfect life; and when all that was mortal of her died to this world, her words and deeds of unutterable love shed a twilight around her memory that will fade only in the brightness of heaven.