TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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FLOWERS AND FRUIT FROM THE
WRITINGS OF HARRIET
BEECHER STOWE
[Illustration: (decorative leaf)]
ARRANGED BY
ABBIE H. FAIRFIELD
[Illustration: (colophon)]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1888
Copyright, 1888,
BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_:
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE INNER LIFE 1
CHAPTER II.
HUMAN NATURE 55
CHAPTER III.
WOMAN 84
CHAPTER IV.
CHILDREN 105
CHAPTER V.
EDUCATION 118
CHAPTER VI.
NATURE 134
CHAPTER VII.
LITERATURE AND ART 158
CHAPTER VIII.
NEW ENGLAND LIFE 171
CHAPTER IX.
MISCELLANEOUS 188
FLOWERS AND FRUIT.
CHAPTER I.
THE INNER LIFE.
THE MINISTER’S WOOING.
[Sidenote: Sympathy.]
When we feel a thing ourselves, we can see very quick the same in
others.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 in which 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?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 no words 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Blessedness _vs._ 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.... By what name
shall we call this beautiful twilight, this night of the soul, so
starry with heavenly mysteries? _Not_ happiness, 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Influence of the invisible.]
[Sidenote: 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 bleeding footsteps;—women are always turning from
the abstract to the individual, and feeling where the philosopher
only thinks.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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!
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Repression.]
It was not pride, nor sternness, but a sort of habitual
shamefacedness that kept 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 this _once for all_ in 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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
one noiseless 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 not carry one deathward
more surely than this worst wound of the soul. God has made us so
mercifully that there is no _certainty_, however dreadful, to which
life-forces do not in time adjust themselves; but to uncertainty
there is no possible adjustment.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 we _can_; 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Control of the thoughts.]
“How could you help it, _mignonne_? Can you stop your thinking?”
Mary said, after a moment’s blush,—“I can _try_!”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The ideal and the practical.]
Nothing is more striking, in the light and shadow of the human drama,
than to 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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!
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 the uttermost, 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
OLDTOWN FOLKS.
[Sidenote: Moral earnestness.]
It is noticeable, in every battle of opinion, that honest, sincere,
moral earnestness has a certain advantage over mere intellectual
cleverness.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Silent companionship.]
The kind of silence which gives a sense of companionship.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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
morbid _spiritual 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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, and live
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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 more outspoken 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Soul-relation.]
Is it not true that, as we grow older, the relationship of souls will
make itself felt?
PALMETTO LEAVES.
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND.
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Heimweh.]
But there are souls sent into this world who seem to have always
mysterious affinities for 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 delicate habit. 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Love—a test.]
Nothing so much shows what a human being is in moral advancement as
the quality of his love.
LITTLE FOXES.
[Sidenote: 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?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Expression of love.]
“Dispute your mother’s hateful dogma, that love is to be taken for
granted without 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 before a 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 Death shoots 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.
HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
[Sidenote: 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.
THE CHIMNEY CORNER.
[Sidenote: Conversation.]
_Real_ conversation 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 brace ourselves 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
THE MAYFLOWER.
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Superiority.]
It is one mark of a superior mind to understand and be influenced by
the superiority of others.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sympathy.]
The same quickness which makes a mind buoyant in gladness often makes
it gentlest and most sympathetic in sorrow.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: God’s sympathy.]
It is well for man that there is one Being who sees the suffering
heart _as 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Capacity of feeling.]
A very unnecessary and uncomfortable capacity of _feeling_, 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Heart-wisdom _vs._ 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,
has drawn 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Living together.]
From that time I _lived_ with her—and there are some persons who can
make the word _live_ signify 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Ministering spirits.]
What then? May we look among the band of ministering spirits for our
own departed ones? Whom would God be more likely to send us? Have we
in heaven a friend who knew us to the heart’s core? a friend to whom
we have unfolded our soul in its most secret recesses? to whom we
have confessed our weaknesses and deplored our griefs? If we are to
have a ministering spirit, who better adapted? Have we not memories
which correspond to such a belief? When our soul has been cast down,
has never an invisible voice whispered, “There is lifting up”? Have
not gales and breezes of sweet and healing thought been wafted over
us, as if an angel had shaken from his wings the odors of paradise?
Many a one, we are confident, can remember such things,—and whence
come they? Why do the children of the pious mother, whose grave has
grown green and smooth with years, seem often to walk through perils
and dangers fearful and imminent as the crossing of Mohammed’s fiery
gulf on the edge of a drawn sword, yet walk unhurt? Ah! could we
see that attendant form, that face where the angel conceals not the
mother, our question would be answered.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Influence of a mother’s prayer.]
Something there is in the voice of real prayer that thrills a child’s
heart, even before he understands it; the holy tones are a kind of
heavenly music, and far-off in distant years, the callous and worldly
man often thrills to his heart’s core, when some turn of life recalls
to him his mother’s prayer.
PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY.
[Sidenote: Taught by suffering.]
It sometimes seems to take a stab, a thrust, a wound, to open in some
hearts the capacity of deep feeling and deep thought. There are
things taught by suffering that can be taught in no other way. By
suffering sometimes is wrought out in a person the power of loving
and of appreciating love. During the first year, Lillie had often
seemed to herself in a sort of wild, chaotic state. The coming in
of a strange, new, spiritual life was something so inexplicable to
her that it agitated and distressed her; and sometimes, when she
appeared more petulant and fretful than usual, it was only the stir
and vibration on her weak nerves of new feelings, which she wanted
the power to express. These emotions at first were painful to her.
She felt weak, miserable, and good-for-nothing. It seemed to her that
her whole life had been a wretched cheat, and that she had ill repaid
the devotion of her husband. At first these thoughts only made her
bitter and angry; and she contended against them. But, as she sank
from day to day, and grew weaker and weaker, she grew more gentle;
and a better spirit seemed to enter into her.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The object of life.]
“The great object of life is not happiness; and when we have lost
our own personal happiness, we have not lost all that life is worth
living for. No, John, the very best of life often lies beyond that.
When we have learned to let ourselves go, then we may find that there
is a better, a nobler, and a truer life for us.” ... “If we contend
with, and fly from our duties, simply because they gall us and
burden us, we go against everything; but if we take them up bravely,
then everything goes with us. God and good angels and good men and
all good influences are working with us when we are working for the
right. And in this way, John, you may come to happiness; or, if you
do not come to personal happiness, you may come to something higher
and better. You know that you think it nobler to be an honest man
than a rich man; and I am sure that you will think it better to be a
good man than to be a happy one.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Self-ignorance.]
It is astonishing how blindly people sometimes go on as to the
character of their own conduct, till suddenly, like a torch in a dark
place, the light of another person’s opinion is thrown in upon them,
and they begin to judge themselves under the quickening influence of
another person’s moral magnetism. Then, indeed, it often happens that
the graves give up their dead, and that there is a sort of interior
resurrection and judgment.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sympathy.]
When we are feeling with the nerves of some one else, we notice every
roughness and inconvenience.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Clairvoyance.]
A terrible sort of clairvoyance that seems to beset very sincere
people, and makes them sensitive to the presence of anything unreal
or untrue.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Unacknowledged motives.]
No, she did not say it. It would be well for us all if we _did_
put into words, plain and explicit, many instinctive resolves and
purposes that arise in our hearts, and which, for want of being so
expressed, influence us undetected and unchallenged. If we would say
out boldly, “I don’t care for right or wrong, or good or evil, or
anybody’s rights or anybody’s happiness, or the general good, or God
himself,—all I care for, or feel the least interest in, is to have a
good time myself, and I mean to do it, come what may,”—we should be
only expressing a feeling which often lies in the dark back-room of
the human heart; and saying it might alarm us from the drugged sleep
of life. It might rouse us to shake off the slow, creeping paralysis
of selfishness and sin before it is forever too late.
BETTY’S BRIGHT IDEA.
[Sidenote: Aspiration.]
That noble discontent that rises to aspiration for higher things.
DEACON PITKIN’S FARM.
[Sidenote: The lesson of faith.]
“Well, daughter,” said the deacon, “it’s a pity we should go through
all we do in this world and not learn anything by it. I hope the
Lord has taught me not to worry, but just do my best, and leave
myself and everything else in his hands. We can’t help ourselves,—we
can’t make one hair white or black. Why should we wear our lives out
fretting? If I’d a known _that_ years ago, it would a been better for
us all.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: “All for the best.”]
“She’s allers sayin’ things is for the best, maybe she’ll come
to think so about this,—folks gen’ally does when they can’t help
themselves.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sympathy.]
Eyes that have never wept cannot comprehend sorrow.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Trust.]
“Leave it!”
These were words often in that woman’s mouth, and they expressed
that habit of her life which made her victorious over all troubles,
that habit of trust in the Infinite Will that actually could and
did _leave_ every accomplished event in his hand without murmur and
without conflict.
AGNES OF SORRENTO.
[Sidenote: Power of sympathy.]
Such is the wonderful power of human sympathy that the discovery
even of the existence of a soul capable of understanding our inner
life often operates as a perfect charm; every thought and feeling
and aspiration carries with it a new value, from the interwoven
consciousness that attends it, of the worth it would bear to that
other mind; so that, while that person lives, our existence is
doubled in value, even though oceans divide us.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Difficulty of inspiring others.]
But he soon discovered, what every earnest soul learns who has been
baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and
inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and
convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the
spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence
and indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,—that the
curse of Cassandra is upon him, forever to burn and writhe under
awful visions of truths which no one around him will regard.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Good wherever we seek it.]
As a bee can extract pure honey from the blossoms of some plants
whose leaves are poisonous, so some souls can nourish themselves only
with the holier and more ethereal parts of popular belief.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Naïveté.]
“Blessed are the flowers of God that grow in cool solitudes, and have
never been profaned by the hot sun and dust of this world.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sorrow a preparation for love.]
Never does love strike so deep and immediate a root as in a sorrowful
and desolated nature; there it has nothing to dispute the soil, and
soon fills it with its interlacing fibre.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sunshine of the heart.]
“He is happy, like the birds,” said Agnes, “because he flies near
heaven.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Dreams.]
Dreams are the hushing of the bodily senses, that the eyes of the
spirit may open.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Lost innocence irrecoverable.]
When a man has once lost that unconscious soul-purity which exists in
a mind unscathed by the fires of passion, no after-tears can weep it
back again. No penance, no prayer, no anguish of remorse, can give
back the simplicity of a soul that has never been stained.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The strongest passions.]
No passions are deeper in their hold, more pervading and more vital
to the whole human being, than those that make their first entrance
through the higher nature, and, beginning with a religious and
poetic ideality, gradually work their way through the whole fabric
of the human existence. From grosser passions, whose roots lie in
the senses, there is always a refuge in man’s loftier nature. He can
cast them aside with contempt, and leave them as one whose lower
story is flooded can remove to a higher loft, and live serenely with
a purer air and wider prospect. But to love that is born of ideality,
of intellectual sympathy, of harmonies of the spiritual and immortal
nature, of the very poetry and purity of the soul, if it be placed
where reason and religion forbid its exercise and expression, what
refuge but the grave,—what hope but that wide eternity where all
human barriers fall, all human relations end, and love ceases to be a
crime.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Agony in the voice.]
It is singular how the dumb, imprisoned soul, locked within the walls
of the body, sometimes gives such a piercing power to the tones of
the voice during the access of a great agony. The effect is entirely
involuntary and often against the most strenuous opposition of the
will; but one sometimes hears another reading or repeating words
with an intense vitality, a living force, which tells of some inward
anguish or conflict of which the language itself gives no expression.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A sympathetic God.]
The great Hearer of Prayer regards each heart in its own scope
of vision, and helps not less the mistaken than the enlightened
distress. And for that matter, who is enlightened? who carries to
God’s throne a trouble or a temptation in which there is _not_
somewhere a misconception or a mistake?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Transient uplifting.]
We hold it better to have even transient upliftings of the nobler and
more devout element of man’s nature than never to have any at all,
and that he who goes on in worldly and sordid courses, without ever a
spark of religious enthusiasm or a throb of aspiration, is less of a
man than he who sometimes soars heavenward, though his wings be weak
and he fall again.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Coincidence.]
When a man has a sensitive or sore spot in his heart, from the
pain of which he would gladly flee to the ends of the earth, it is
marvellous what coincidences of events will be found to press upon it
wherever he may go.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Silence of deep emotion.]
They both sat awhile in that kind of quietude which often falls
between two who have stirred some deep fountain of emotion.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Innocence.]
There is something pleading and pitiful in the simplicity of perfect
ignorance,—a rare and delicate beauty in its freshness, like the
morning-glory cup, which, once withered by the heat, no second
morning can restore.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: World conflicts.]
“This is such a beautiful world,” said Agnes, “who would think it
would be such a hard one to live in?—such battles and conflicts as
people have here!”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Nervous sensibility.]
As one looking through a prism sees a fine bordering of rainbow on
every object, so he beheld a glorified world. His former self seemed
to him something forever past and gone. He looked at himself as at
another person, who had sinned and suffered, and was now resting in
beatified repose; and he fondly thought all this was firm reality,
and believed that he was now proof against all earthly impressions,
able to hear and to judge with the dispassionate calmness of a
disembodied spirit. He did not know that this high-strung calmness,
this fine clearness, were only the most intense forms of nervous
sensibility, and as vividly susceptible to every mortal impression as
is the vitalized chemical plate to the least action of the sun’s rays.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
[Sidenote: Sorrow an educator.]
Any mind that is capable of a _real sorrow_ is capable of good.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Individuality.]
Now, the reflections of two men, sitting side by side, are a curious
thing,—seated on the same seat, having the same eyes, ears, hands,
and organs of all sorts, and having pass before their eyes the same
objects,—it is wonderful what a variety we shall find in these same
reflections.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Inspiration.]
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea, long overlooked, and
trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new
light, as a discovered diamond.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Power of mind over body.]
Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that, for a time,
can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like
steel, so that the weak become so mighty.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: True heroism.]
Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours,
how far easier it were to die than to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror,
finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic.
There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry
through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal
glory and rest.
But to live,—to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low,
harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every
power of feeling gradually smothered,—this long and wasting heart
martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by
drop, hour after hour,—this is the true searching test of what there
may be in man or woman.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Moral atmosphere.]
An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being;
and the man or woman who _feels_ strongly, healthily, and justly,
on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the
human race.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Self-sacrifice.]
There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up
into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with
many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm
for the desolate and the distressed.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Strength of despair.]
When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which
endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of
every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the
heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Self-forgetfulness.]
“Thee uses thyself only to learn how to love neighbor, Ruth,” said
Simeon, looking with a beaming face on Ruth.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Natural religious sensibility.]
He had one of those natures which could better and more clearly
conceive of religious things from its own perceptions and instincts
than many a matter-of-fact and practical Christian. The gift to
appreciate and the sense to feel the finer shades and relations of
moral things often seems an attribute of those whose whole life shows
a careless disregard of them. Hence, Moore, Byron, Goethe, often
speak words more wisely descriptive of the true religious sentiment,
than another man whose whole life is governed by it. In such minds,
disregard of religion is a more fearful treason,—a more deadly sin.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Superstition.]
No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man. The
Christian is composed by the belief of a wise, all-ruling Father,
whose presence fills the void unknown with light and order; but to
the man who has dethroned God, the spirit-land is, indeed, in the
words of the Hebrew poet, “a land of darkness and the shadow of
death,” without any order, where the light is as darkness. Life and
death to him are haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague
and shadowy dread.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The human soul.]
After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a
human soul is an awful ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to
have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful
perhapses,—those shudderings and tremblings which it can no more
live down than it can outlive its own eternity! What a fool is he
who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a
spirit he dares not meet alone,—whose voice, smothered far down, and
piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning
trumpet of doom!
DRED.
[Sidenote: Practical and ideal.]
The divine part of man is often shame-faced and self-distrustful,
ill at home in this world, and standing in awe of nothing so much as
what is called common sense; and yet common sense very often, by its
own keenness, is able to see that these unavailable currencies of
another’s mind are of more worth, if the world only knew it, than the
ready coin of its own; and so the practical and the ideal nature are
drawn together.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Inexplicable preferences.]
Sensitive people never like the fatigue of justifying their
instincts. Nothing, in fact, is less capable of being justified by
technical reasons than those fine insights into character whereupon
affection is built. We have all had experience of preferences which
would not follow the most exactly ascertained catalogue of virtues,
and would be made captive where there was very little to be said in
justification of the captivity.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Congeniality of opposites.]
“Why, surely,” said Anne, “one wants one’s friends to be congenial, I
should think.”
“So we do; and there is nothing in the world so congenial as
differences. To be sure, the differences must be harmonious. In
music, now, for instance, one doesn’t want a repetition of the
same notes, but differing notes that chord. Nay, even discords are
indispensable to complete harmony. Now, Nina has just that difference
from me which chords with me; and all our little quarrels—for we have
had a good many, and I dare say shall have more—are only a sort of
chromatic passages,—discords of the seventh, leading into harmony. My
life is inward, theorizing, self-absorbed. I am hypochondriac, often
morbid. The vivacity and acuteness of her outer life makes her just
what I need. She wakens, she rouses, and keeps me in play; and her
quick instincts are often more than a match for my reason.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Proof of heaven.]
“How do you know there is any heaven, anyhow?”
“Know it?” said Milly, her eyes kindling, and striking her staff on
the ground, “Know it? I know it by de _hankering arter it_ I got
in here;” giving her broad chest a blow which made it resound like
a barrel. “De Lord knowed what he was ’bout when he made us. When
he made babies rootin’ ’round, wid der poor little mouths open, he
made milk, and de mammies for ’em too. Chile, we’s nothing but great
babies, dat ain’t got our eyes open,—rootin’ ’round an’ ’round; but
de Father’ll feed us yet—He will so.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Power of song.]
As oil will find its way into crevices where water cannot penetrate,
so song will find its way where speech can no longer enter.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Night resolutions.]
What we have thought and said under the august presence of witnessing
stars, or beneath the holy shadows of moonlight, seems with the dry,
hot heat of next day’s sun to take wings, and rise to heaven with the
night’s clear drops. If all the prayers and good resolutions which
are laid down on sleeping pillows could be found there on awaking,
the world would be better than it is.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Transition periods.]
There are times in life when the soul, like a half-grown climbing
vine, hangs hovering tremulously, stretching out its tendrils for
something to ascend by. Such are generally the great transition
periods of life, when we are passing from the ideas and conditions
of one stage of existence to those of another. Such times are most
favorable for the presentation of the higher truths of religion.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Connection with the spirit world.]
This life may truly be called a haunted house, built as it is on the
very confines of the land of darkness and the shadow of death. A
thousand living fibres connect us with the unknown and unseen state;
and the strongest hearts, which never stand still for any mortal
terror, have sometimes hushed their very beating at a breath of a
whisper from within the veil. Perhaps the most resolute unbeliever in
spiritual things has hours of which he would be ashamed to tell, when
he, too, yields to the powers of those awful affinities which bind us
to that unknown realm.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Suffering in silence.]
It is the last triumph of affection and magnanimity, when a loving
heart can respect the suffering silence of its beloved, and allow
that lonely liberty in which only some natures can find comfort.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Joy in endurance.]
And, as he sang and prayed, that strange joy arose within him,
which, like the sweetness of night flowers, is born of darkness and
tribulation. The soul has in it somewhat of the divine, in that it
can have joy in endurance beyond the joy of indulgence.
They mistake who suppose that the highest happiness lies in wishes
accomplished—in prosperity, wealth, favor, and success. There has
been a joy in dungeons and on racks passing the joy of harvest. A joy
strange and solemn, mysterious even to its possessor. A white stone
dropped from that signet ring, peace, which a dying Saviour took
from his own bosom, and bequeathed to those who endure the cross,
despising the shame.
SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS.
[Sidenote: Inward peace.]
How natural it is to say of some place sheltered, simple, cool, and
retired, here one might find peace, as if peace came from without,
and not from within. In the shadiest and stillest places may be
the most turbulent hearts, and there are hearts which, through the
busiest scenes, carry with them unchanging peace.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Grace in affliction.]
I have read of Alpine flowers leaning their cheeks on the snow. I
wonder if any flowers grow near enough to that snow to touch it. I
mean to go and see. So I went; there, sure enough, my little fringed
purple bell, to which I had give the name of “suspirium,” was
growing, not only close to the snow but in it.
Thus God’s grace, shining steadily on the waste places of the human
heart, brings up heavenward sighings and aspirations, which pierce
through the cold snows of affliction, and tell that there is yet life
beneath.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: God as an artist.]
I was glad to walk on alone: for the scenery was so wonderful that
human sympathy and communion seemed to be out of the question. The
effect of such scenery to our generally sleeping and drowsy souls,
bound with a double chain of earthliness and sin, is like the
electric touch of the angel on Peter, bound and sleeping. They make
us realize that we were not only made to commune with God, but also
what a God He is with whom we may commune. We talk of poetry, we talk
of painting, we go to the ends of the earth to see the artists and
great men of this world; but what a poet, what an artist, is God!
Truly said Michel Angelo, “The true painting is only a copy of the
divine perfections—a shadow of his pencil.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Soul-striving.]
The human soul seems to me an imprisoned essence, striving after
somewhat divine. There is strength in it, as of suffocated flame,
finding vent now through poetry, now in painting, now in music,
sculpture, or architecture; various are the crevices and fissures,
but the flame is one.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Shadow.]
What a curious kind of thing shadow is,—that invisible veil, falling
so evenly and so lightly over all things, bringing with it such
thoughts of calmness and rest. I wonder the old Greeks did not build
temples to Shadow, and call her the sister of Thought and Peace. The
Hebrew writers speak of the “overshadowing of the Almighty;” they
call his protection “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
Even as the shadow of Mont Blanc falls like a Sabbath across this
valley, so falls the sense of his presence across our weary life-road.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Heimweh.]
Why? why this veil of dim and indefinable anguish at sight of
whatever is most fair, at hearing whatever is most lovely? Is it the
exiled spirit, yearning for its own? Is it the captive, to whom the
ray of heaven’s own glory comes through the crevice of his dungeon
wall?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Seeing and feeling.]
It is not enough to open one’s eyes on scenes; one must be able to be
“en rapport” with them. Just so in the spiritual world, we sometimes
_see_ great truths,—see that God is beautiful and surpassingly
lovely; but at other times we _feel_ both nature and God, and O, how
different _seeing_ and _feeling_!
POGANUC PEOPLE.
[Sidenote: Longing for love in the unlovely.]
There are hard, sinful, unlovely souls, who yet long to be loved,
who sigh in their dark prison for that tenderness, that devotion,
of which they are consciously unworthy. Love might redeem them; but
who can love them? There is a fable of a prince, doomed by a cruel
enchanter to wear a loathsome, bestial form, till some fair woman
should redeem him by the transforming kiss of love. The fable is a
parable of the experience of many a lost human soul....
Who can read the awful mysteries of a single soul? We see human
beings, hard, harsh, earthly, and apparently without an aspiration
for anything high and holy; but let us never say that there is not
far down in the depths of any soul a smothered aspiration, a dumb,
repressed desire to be something higher and purer, to attain the
perfectness to which God calls it.
LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW.
[Sidenote: Seeing the bright side.]
“She shall be called little Pussy Willow, and I shall give her the
gift of _always seeing the bright side of everything_. That gift will
be more to her than beauty or riches or honors. It is not so much
matter what color one’s eyes are as what one sees with them. There
is a bright side to everything, if people only knew it, and the best
eyes are those which are always able to see this bright side.”
A DOG’S MISSION.
[Sidenote: Reaction of harshness.]
A conscientious person should beware of getting into a passion, for
every sharp word one speaks comes back and lodges like a sliver in
one’s own heart; and such slivers hurt us worse than they ever can
any one else.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Man’s childish impatience.]
Ah, the child is father of the man! when he gets older he will have
the great toys of which these are emblems; he will believe in what
he sees and touches,—in house, land, railroad stock,—he will believe
in these earnestly and really, and in his eternal manhood nominally
and partially. And when his father’s messengers meet him, and face
him about, and take him off his darling pursuits, and sweep his big
ships into the fire, and crush his full-grown cars, then the grown
man will complain and murmur, and wonder as the little man does now.
The Father wants the future, the Child the present, all through life,
till death makes the child a man.
MY WIFE AND I.
[Sidenote: Discipline of patience.]
The moral discipline of bearing with evil patiently is a great deal
better and more ennobling than the most vigorous assertion of one’s
personal rights.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Ennobling power of sorrow.]
When we look at the apparent recklessness with which great sorrows
seem to be distributed among the children of the earth, there is no
way to keep our faith in a Fatherly love, except to recognize how
invariably the sorrows that spring from love are a means of enlarging
and dignifying a human being. Nothing great or good comes without
birth-pangs, and in just the proportion that natures grow more noble
their capacities of suffering increase.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Line between right and wrong.]
The line between right and wrong seems always so indefinite, like
the line between any two colors of the prism; it is hard to say just
where one ends and another begins.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Doubt.]
“Doubt is very well as a sort of constitutional crisis in the
beginning of one’s life; but if it runs on and gets to be chronic it
breaks a fellow up, and makes him morally spindling and sickly. Men
that _do_ anything in the world must be men of strong convictions; it
won’t do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and lifting up
one foot, not knowing where to set it down next.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Friends.]
“I don’t think,” said she, “you should say ‘_make_’ friends,—friends
are _discovered_, rather than made. There are people who are in their
own nature friends, only they don’t know each other; but certain
things, like poetry, music, and painting, are like the free-masons’
signs,—they reveal the initiated to each other.”
WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS.
[Sidenote: Forgiveness of friends.]
“Yes,” said Harry, “forgiveness of enemies used to be the _ultima
thule_ of virtue; but I rather think it will have to be forgiveness
of friends. I call the man a perfect Christian that can always
forgive his friends.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Altruism.]
Do not our failures and mistakes often come from discouragement? Does
not every human being need a believing second self, whose support
and approbation shall reinforce one’s failing courage? The saddest
hours of life are when we doubt ourselves. To sensitive, excitable
people, who expend nervous energy freely, must come many such low
tides. “Am I really a miserable failure,—a poor, good-for-nothing,
abortive attempt?” In such crises we need another self to restore our
equilibrium.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Reproach.]
The agony of his self-reproach and despair had been doubled by the
reproaches and expostulations of many of his own family friends, who
poured upon bare nerves the nitric acid of reproach.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Help from work.]
Something definite to do is, in some crises, a far better medicine
for a sick soul than any amount of meditation and prayer. One step
fairly taken in a right direction goes farther than any amount of
agonized back-looking.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Praise and blame.]
Praise is sunshine; it warms, it inspires, it promotes growth: blame
and rebuke are rain and hail; they beat down and bedraggle, even
though they may at times be necessary.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: God working through man.]
The invisible Christ must be made known through human eyes; He must
speak though a voice of earthly love, and a human hand inspired by
his spirit must be reached forth to save.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Inner life.]
The external life is positive, visible, definable; easily made the
subject of conversation. The inner life is shy, retiring, most
difficult to be expressed in words, often inexplicable, even to the
subject of it, yet no less a positive reality than the outward.
RELIGIOUS POEMS.
[Sidenote: Peace through suffering.]
For not alone in those old Eastern regions
Are Christ’s beloved ones tried by cross and chain;
In many a house are his elect ones hidden,
His martyrs suffering in their patient pain.
The rack, the cross, life’s weary wrench of woe,
The world sees not, as slow, from day to day,
In calm, unspoken patience, sadly still,
The loving spirit bleeds itself away;
But there are hours, when from the heavens unfolding
Come down the angels with the glad release,
And we look upward, to behold in glory
Our suffering loved ones borne away to peace.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The spirit within.]
As some rare perfume in a vase of clay
Pervades it with a fragrance not its own,
So, when Thou dwellest in a mortal soul,
All heaven’s own sweetness seems around it thrown.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The calm of God’s love.]
When winds are raging o’er the upper ocean,
And billows wild contend with angry roar,
’Tis said, far down beneath the wild commotion,
That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore.
Far, far beneath, the noise of tempest dieth,
And silver waves chime ever peacefully;
And no rude storm, how fierce soe’er he flieth,
Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea.
So to the soul that knows thy love, O Purest,
There is a temple peaceful evermore!
And all the babble of life’s angry voices
Die in hushed stillness at its sacred door.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: God’s comfort.]
Think not, when the wailing winds of autumn
Drive the shivering leaflets from the trees,—
Think not all is over: spring returneth;
Buds and leaves and blossoms thou shalt see.
Think not, when thy heart is waste and dreary,
When thy cherished hopes lie chill and sere,—
Think not all is over: God still loveth;
He will wipe away thy every tear.