When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.--Shakspeare.
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.--Campbell.
Gathering clouds crowd thickest round the tallest
mountain, yet do their summits, far up above, forever gaze out upon the
undimmed sun. So is it with the great heart smitten with deep sorrow.
There is no soul upon whom the glory of God's love falls more serenely
and uninterruptedly. There is no better friend, no lovelier associate.
"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." And comfort
does come, in the broad and kindly love and mercy toward humanity which
those who have known suffering so frequently evince, "Out of suffering
have emerged the strongest souls;" says Chapin, "the most massive
characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation
robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful
first seen the gates of heaven." "The echo of the nest-life, the voice
of our modest, fairer, holier soul" says Richter, "is audible only in a
sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their
eye." "Every noble crown is, and on earth will ever be, a crown of
thorns," says Carlyle "Sorrow", says Haunay, with rare knowledge, "turns
all the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge."
Sometimes all nature seems to condole with animate woes:
One weeping heart may tone a rural scene
To sadness. Reverently the trees will bend;
The little stream will sigh, with heaving pulse,
And swans, in soft and solemn silence float--
Grief's snowy celebrants.
It is a manifest peculiarity of the human mind to believe that its
sorrows should be more enduring than they really are. We have in this
phenomenon some of the clearest views of our weakness and inconsistency,
for though we deplore the destiny which deals out so much misery to us,
yet we despise ourselves, and are also thought somewhat less of by our
associates, if we do not embalm our griefs and remain a sort of
mummy-house above ground until the memory of our friends has grown
faulty and unreliable when applied to our affairs. Thus,