_To Miss Grace Norton._
131 Mount Vernon St., Boston.
July 28th [1883].
My dear Grace,
Before the sufferings of others I am always utterly powerless, and your
letter reveals such depths of suffering that I hardly know what to say
to you. This indeed is not my last word--but it must be my first. You
are not isolated, verily, in such states of feeling as this--that is, in
the sense that you appear to make all the misery of all mankind your
own; only I have a terrible sense that you give all and receive
nothing--that there is no reciprocity in your sympathy--that you have
all the affliction of it and none of the returns. However--I am
determined not to speak to you except with the voice of stoicism. I
don't know _why_ we live--the gift of life comes to us from I don't know
what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for
the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the
most valuable thing we know anything about, and it is therefore
presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet
left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power,
and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet
in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never
cease to feel, and though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to,
there is something that holds one in one's place, makes it a standpoint
in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake. You are right
in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the
_same_, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything
that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power.
Only don't, I beseech you, _generalize_ too much in these sympathies and
tendernesses--remember that every life is a special problem which is not
yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of
your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and
dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who
love and know, live so most. We help each other--even unconsciously,
each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute
to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes
in great waves--no one can know that better than you--but it rolls over
us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we
know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we
remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and
it is blind, whereas we after a manner see. My dear Grace, you are
passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing
but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a
darkness, it is not an end, or _the_ end. Don't think, don't feel, any
more than you can help, don't conclude or decide--don't do anything but
_wait_. Everything will pass, and serenity and _accepted_ mysteries and
disillusionments, and the tenderness of a few good people, and new
opportunities and ever so much of life, in a word, will remain. You will
do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not
to _melt_ in the meanwhile. I insist upon the necessity of a sort of
mechanical condensation--so that however fast the horse may run away
there will, when he pulls up, be a somewhat agitated but perfectly
identical G. N. left in the saddle. Try not to be ill--that is all; for
in that there is a failure. You are marked out for success, and you must
not fail. You have my tenderest affection and all my confidence. Ever
your faithful friend--