An Invalid

“ My own experience in childhood was of a painful and incessant longing for the future—a longing which enhanced all its innumerable pains, and embittered many of its pleasures—a longing for strength of body and of mind, for independence of action—for an escape, in short, from the conditions of childhood. The privilege which I then missed I have found now. Let it be a comfort to all sorrowing friends of those who are under any sort of doom without an assigned period to know, that in such cases the sense of doom vanishes. When the future becomes a blank to us, it becomes presently invisible. ”

“ We can tell that while revolutions are grandly operating, by which life and the world will in time change their aspect,—while a progress is advancing to which it is now scarcely conceivable that we should ever have dreamed of putting our hands,—there is not one of our passing thoughts that is not ordained,—not a sigh of weariness unheeded,—not an effort of patience that is not met half-way by divine pity,—not a generous emotion of triumph in the world’s improvement that is not hallowed by the divine sympathy ever living and breathing round about us. ”

“ The game and fruit, eaten in their season, remain as comforts and luxuries, preserved in the love that sent them. Every letter and conversation abides,—every new idea is mine for ever; all the knowledge, all the experience of the year, is so much gain. Even the courses of the planets, and the changes of the moon, and the hay-making and harvest, are so much immortal wealth—as real a possession as all the pain of the year was a passing apparition. Yes, even the quick bursts of sunshine are still mine. ”

“ It is a joy to recur, in memory or imagination, to any moral conflict, past or possible, in which all our faculties are needed, and wherein that force is at least conceived to be employed which must otherwise corrode us. But if any such enterprise actually presents itself—confronts us at the moment—how great is the blessing! It may bring toil and difficulty to ourselves, and doubt and blame from others; but if it be clear to ourselves, how keen is the sense of life it gives at some seasons, though it may overpower our weakness at others! ”

“ The posthumous love must suffer;—or if not the love, the respect for the departed. It is impossible to love one who appears in a selfish aspect,—though it be the merest mask, most briefly worn,—so well as the countenance that never concealed its benevolence for a moment. Let then the timely thought of the future,—a provident care for the memory of the dying friend, suggest the easy prudence which may obviate encroachment. Let the bewildered sufferer be frequently and cheerfully told the hour,—and informed that such an one is going to rest, to be replaced by another for so many hours. ”

“ O! if every one who sorrows for us would help us to assert our claim to Nature’s nursing, we should soon have our solace and our due. We have not all the vigour and spirit,—nor even the inclination, in our morbid state, to turn our faces to the fountain of solace—the fresh waters which cool the spirit when fretted by its tormenting companion. We cannot infallibly keep alive in our weak selves the love of Nature which would lead us to repose ourselves upon her, and forget the evils which even she cannot cure. ”

“ We are not proud, like the young beauty with her conquest over hearts, or like the political or literary hero with his sway over the passions or the reason; but we are elate—and not without cause—elate in our privilege of annihilating the constraint and distaste inspired by our condition, and of finding ourselves restored to something like an equality of intercourse with the healthy in soul. The best and highest must ever be selected from among the healthy and the happy—from among those whose conditions of being are the most perfectly fulfilled ”

“ I have known a kind-hearted and self-denying man require of two or three members of his family to sit and talk and be merry in his chamber, two or three hours after midnight:—and both for want of a mere intimation that it was night, and time for the nurse’s rest. How it makes one shudder to think of this being one’s own case! The passing doubt whether one can trust one’s friends, when the season comes, to save one from such tyrannical mistakes, is a doubt sickening to the heart. ”

“ History becomes like actual life; life becomes comprehensive as history, and abstract as speculation. Not only does human life, from the cradle to the grave, lie open to us, but the whole succession of generations, without the boundary line of the past being interposed; and with the very clouds of the future so thinned,—rendered so penetrable, as that we believe we discern the salient and bright points of the human destiny yet to be revealed. ”

“ A man’s self-communion on the matter is his own private affair: and little know the systematic calumniators, who for party’s or prejudice’s sake, assail those who can only return silence, how they really work in some hearts they seek to wound. In some they may excite rage or bitter anguish; but there are others,—probably many,—in which they cause no severer pain than a pitying sorrow for themselves, while they kindle a glow of courage, patience, and benignity,—they cause a more exquisite mingling of sweet emotions,—than were ever aroused by praise. ”

“ At these seasons, when, though we know all that can be said of renewed powers and relish, and a more elevated and privileged life beyond the grave, we cannot feel it; and, while admitting all such consolations as truth, we cannot enjoy them, but, as a mere matter of inclination, had rather resign our privileges;—in these seasons, when the wish would be father to an opposite thought, the belief in our immortality is at the strongest; the truth of our inability to die becomes overwhelming, and the sleep of the grave appears too light to satisfy our need of rest. ”

“ The sufferer’s spirits rise in proportion to the pain he experiences. He is never so happy as when he feels his paroxysms coming on,—not only because pain of body acts as relief from the gnawing misery of his mind, but because every tangible proof that he is under chastening and discipline, conveys to him a sense of his dignity—reassures him, as a child of Providence. From this may follow too naturally his learning to regard pain as a qualification for ease—as a purchase-money of future good—a superstition as low and depraving as almost any the mind can entertain. ”

“ The young aspirant is warned betimes, without practical effect, that the privileges of obscurity are irrecoverable: that, when he has become famous, he may long in vain for the quiet shelter of privacy, that he has left. He feels this, with a sense of panic, when he has gained the celebrity he longs for, and is undergoing his first agonies from adverse opinion. If he would but believe us, we watchers could tell him that, though he can never retreat into his original privacy, there is a yet more complete shelter before him, if he does not linger, or take up his rest short of his journey’s end. ”

“ When we remember that this is the same sun that guided the first vessels of commerce over the sea—the same by whose light Magna Charta was signed in Runnymede—that shone in the eyes of Cromwell after Naseby fight—that rose on 800,000 free blacks in the West Indies on a certain August morning—and is now shining down into the dreariest recesses of the coal-mine, the prison, and the cellar—how can we doubt that darkness is to be chased away, and God’s sunshine to vivify, at last, the whole of our world? ”

“ Of all the announcements made in the silence of our solitude, none are so striking as those of deaths, familiar as the thought of death is to us, and natural as our own death would appear to ourselves, and to everybody. To present witnesses, and in the midst of the activity of life, the spectacle of death loses half its force. It is we who feel the awful beauty of it, when the great Recorder intimates to us that they who were strenuous in mutual conflict have lain down side by side; that to old age its infirmities matter no longer, as the body itself is surrendered ”

“ It is as if Time himself were present unseen, whispering to us of a new kindled love,—of marriage, with all its details of “pomp and circumstance;” and then comes the deeper social interest,—the opening of a glimpse into the vista of new generations, while all around the other interests of life are transacting, and the children we knew at their parents’ knees are abroad in the world, acting for themselves, and putting a hand to the destinies of society. ”

“ In the immediate return from the first recoil into the mood of forgiveness, there is something heavenly even to the novice. In the compassion for one’s calumniator there is pain; and it is a pain which increases with experience of life, and with our insight into the peril and misery of an unjust and malicious habit of mind; but in the act of pitying forgiveness, there is a solace so sweet as to make one wonder how long men will be in adopting this remedy for their injuries. ”

“ It is known, however, that herculean men have shrunk to shadows under the infliction, that it has reduced heroes to tremble at the whispering wind, or the striking of the clock, that it turns the raven-hair gray, lets down genius into idiocy, and starves the most vigorous life into an atrophy. How then are the sick to meet this woe, which comes upon them with force exactly proportioned to their weakness! ”

“ It is conceivable to us all that the drowning man may, as is recorded, see his whole life, in all its minute details, presented to him, as in clear vision, in one instant of time, as he lapses into death. Well,—something like both these experiences is that of extreme and dissolving pain, to a certain order of minds. The vision and the attestation are present, without the horrors caused, amidst an earthquake, by the misery of a perishing multitude, though at the cost of more bodily anguish than in the case of the drowning man. ”

“ Amidst the flat contradictions of fact, and oppositions of opinion,—amidst the passion which sets men’s wits to work to conceive of and propose all imaginable motives and results, what an abundance of light is struck out! From a crowd of falsehoods, what a revelation we have of the truth, which no one man, nor party of men, could reveal!—of the wants, wishes, and ideas of every class or coterie of society that can speak for itself, and of some that cannot! ”

“ We may be excluded from much observation of the outer life of men; but of the inner life, which originates and interprets the outer, it is scarcely possible that in any other circumstances we could have known so much. Into what depths of opinion are we not let down! To what soaring heights of speculation are we not borne up! What is there of joy or sorrow, of mystery and marvel, in human experience that is not communicated to us! ”

“ You know, as well as I, how withering would be the sense of our own nothingness, if we tried to take comfort from our own dignity and usefulness. You know, as well as I, how very far we can see from our place on the verge of life, over its expanse, and how ridiculous, if it were not shocking, would be any complacency on the ground of our having followed the instincts of our nature to work, while work was possible,—the issues of such divinely-appointed instrumentality being wholly brought out and directed by Him who framed and actuated us. ”

“ If there are hours when, through pain and weakness, we would fain decline existence altogether, as a sick and wearied child frets at sunshine and music, and would rather sleep in darkness and silence, there is no moment in which we do not believe, as if we saw, that the departed righteous are in communion, full and active, in exact proportion as the ardour and fidelity of their mutual love deserves and necessitates. ”

“ Nothing, perhaps, has impressed me so deeply as the clear view I have of almost all, if not quite the whole, of the suffering I have witnessed being the consequence of vice or ignorance. But when my heart has sickened at the sight, and at the thought of so much gratuitous pain, it has grown strong again in the reflection that, if unnecessary, this misery is temporary,—that the true ground of mourning would be if the pain were not from causes which are remediable. ”

“ It is no contradiction, that some are soured by suffering. Their pains, like mine, are gone; and with them, as with others, it is ideas which remain; and ideas are essentially good, a part of the indestructible inner life which must, from its very nature, sooner or later part with its evil, through experience of the superabounding good of the universe. If one so soured by pain dies in this mood, the ideal part of him is that which remains to be carried into a fresh scene, where the mood cannot be fed by the experience which nourished it here. ”

“ They hear us speak of the landscapes, the portraits, the graceful and beautiful images which adorn the walls; but they observe how, when restless and distressed, we steal a glance upwards at one picture, and find something there which seems to set us right—to rally us at once. If such a picture as the Christus Consolator of Scheffer be within view of the sick-couch— (that talisman, including the consolations of eighteen centuries!—that mysterious assemblage of the redeemed Captives and tranquillised Mourners of a whole Christendom!—that inspired epitome of suffering and solace!) ”

“ We evade the misery, when we can, by stirring books, (the most objective that can be had) , or by seeing what we can of the world by the telescope, or by resorting to some sweet familiar spring of poetry; but this last expedient is impaired by the fear of mixing painful associations with pleasures too sacred and dear to be endangered. Or we defy the foe in reckless anguish, or we endure in silent patience. ”