their lives in public, or surrounded only by sporting trophies and games.
Some enjoy living in their pantries, composing for themselves succulent
dishes, and interested in the doings of the servants, their companions.
Others have turned their salons into nurseries, or feel a predilection
for the stable and the dog-kennels. Such people soon weary of their
surroundings, and move constantly, destroying, when they leave old
quarters, all the objects they had collected.
The men and women who have thus curtailed their belongings are, however,
quite contented with themselves. No doubts ever harass them as to the
commodity or appropriateness of their lodgements and look with pity and
contempt on friends who remain faithful to old habitations. The drawback
to a migratory existence, however, is the fact that, as a French saying
has put it, _Ceux qui se refusent les pensees serieuses tombent dans les
idees noires_. These people are surprised to find as the years go by
that the futile amusements to which they have devoted themselves do not
fill to their satisfaction all the hours of a lifetime. Having provided
no books nor learned to practise any art, the time hangs heavily on their
hands. They dare not look forward into the future, so blank and
cheerless does it appear. The past is even more distasteful to them. So,
to fill the void in their hearts, they hurry out into the crowd as a
refuge from their own thoughts.
Happy those who care to revisit old abodes, childhood's remote wing, and
the moonlit porches where they knew the rapture of a first-love whisper.
Who can enter the chapel where their dead lie, and feel no blush of self-
reproach, nor burning consciousness of broken faith nor wasted
opportunities? The new year will bring to them as near an approach to
perfect happiness as can be attained in life's journey. The fortunate
mortals are rare who can, without a heartache or regret, pass through
their disused and abandoned dwellings; who dare to open every door and
enter all the silent rooms; who do not hurry shudderingly by some obscure
corners, and return with a sigh of relief to the cheerful sunlight and
murmurs of the present.
Sleepless midnight hours come inevitably to each of us, when the creaking
gates of subterranean passages far down in our consciousness open of
themselves, and ghostly inhabitants steal out of awful vaults and force
us to look again into their faces and touch their unhealed wounds.
An old lady whose cheerfulness under a hundred griefs and tribulations
was a marvel and an example, once told a man who had come to her for
counsel in a moment of bitter trouble, that she had derived comfort when
difficulties loomed big around her by writing down all her cares and
worries, making a list of the subjects that harassed her, and had always
found that, when reduced to material written words, the dimensions of her
troubles were astonishingly diminished. She recommended her procedure to
the troubled youth, and prophesied that his anxieties would dwindle away
in the clear atmosphere of pen and paper.
Introspection, the deliberate unlatching of closed wickets, has the same
effect of stealing away the bitterness from thoughts that, if left in the
gloom of semi-oblivion, will grow until they overshadow a whole life. It
is better to follow the example of England's pure Queen, visiting on
certain anniversaries our secret places and holding communion with the
past, for it is by such scrutiny only
_That men may rise on stepping-stones_
_Of their dead selves to higher things_.
Those who have courage to perform thoroughly this task will come out from
the silent chambers purified and chastened, more lenient to the faults
and shortcomings of others, and better fitted to take up cheerfully the
burdens of a new year.
Footnotes:
{276} December thirty-first, 1888.