Lost Cause

“ You struggle so, or, like a wounded wolf, which, in the depths of its cave, awaits his recovery only in time, wrapped in your solitary suffering, you can, near or far, assign a term to your grief, and hope, at least, in forgetfulness. Forgetfulness,—this only inexorable reality of life! Forgetfulness,—this fathomless ocean, wherein come unceasingly to be lost all sorrow, all love, and all curses. ”

“ When the stunned soul can first lift tired eyes On her changed world of ruin, waste and wrack, Ah, what a pang of aching sharp surprise Brings all sweet memories of the lost past back, With wild self-pitying grief of one betrayed, Duped in a land of dreams where Truth is dead! ”

“ While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps, Between us two let there be peace; both joining, As joined in injuries, one enmity Against a foe by doom express assigned us, That cruel Serpent: On me exercise not Thy hatred for this misery befallen; On me already lost, me than thyself More miserable! Both have sinned; but thou Against God only; I against God and thee; And to the place of judgement will return, There with my cries importune Heaven; that all The sentence, from thy head removed, may light On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe ”

“ Their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals Far in the dimming past; We see the little forms as once they were, And whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, The vision fades. We know them lost to us—Forever lost; we cannot have them back; We miss them as we miss the dead, We mourn them as we mourn the dead. ”

“ A shot, a cry, a struggle, and a fainting woman's kiss;
Life's blood let 'mid the grasses—and all a world was lost,
And no one may ever know how he paid the cost.
He is lost in the crowd of the dead, in the night-time of death,
A name on a stone left to tell that he ever drew breath.
So desperate body die there, with your soul's long release,
And, unhappy spirit, God grant you Eternity's peace! ”

“ Life and Death
Of our own selves God makes a glass, wherein
Two shades are imaged, passing like a breath:
And one is Life, whose other name is Sin;
And one is Love, whose other name is Death.
VIII
Sorrow
Death takes her hand and leads her through the waste
Of her own soul, wherein she hears the voice
Of lost Love’s tears, and, famishing, can but taste
The dead-sea fruit of Life’s remembered joys. ”

“ Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that lost world that is neither life nor death. ”

“ Which like as footboys on her actions wait,
That fortune's scale should to my sorrow turn,
And I one day the rash neglect should mourn;
That good to bad should change, and I should be
Lost to this world and all eternity ”

“ But now to-day she had suddenly come on some of the footprints of the Man of Sorrow as He toiled over the mountains of earth searching for lost humanity, and her own heart echoed His love and sorrow for the world. ”

“ This life is a tragedy—for always that which is dearest, is lost in it, and it ends in death. The closing scene is the corpse, the shroud, the coffin—and the curtain drops upon the grave—all beyond is hidden—except to the eye of faith. My experience of life has been all darkness, clouds and storm—and the transient gleams of gladness or of hope have been—not like the sunshine, but like the lightning. ”

“ Lost to himself, but never lost to Thee!
"All souls are Thine; the wings of morning bear
None from that Presence which is everywhere,
Nor hell itself can hide, for Thou art there.
"Through sins of sense, perversities of will,
Through doubt and pain, through guilt and shame and ill,
Thy pitying eye is on Thy creature still.
"Wilt thou not make, Eternal Source and Goal!
In Thy long years, life's broken circle whole,
And change to praise the cry of a lost soul?" ”

“ Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom,
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain. ”

“ The stillness of a dead world laid its spell on all that lived. To-day seemed an unreality, an idle impertinence; the real was that long-buried past which gave its meaning to all around me, touching the night with infinite pathos. Best of all, one's own being became lost to consciousness ”

“ But man, when he shall be dead and stripped and consumed, I pray you, where is he? The cry of despair which the first lost soul uttered when he made the terrible discovery that he was really lost, is still ringing in the abodes of the damned, and the keenness of his misery is still unabated. Ages shall go on, the last day shall come, and an eternity shall follow it, and that cry of despair will still be as thrilling, and that anguish as new and as irremediable. ”

“ There is no connected story of events, thoughts, acts, or feelings. We try in vain to re-collect; but the secrets of the grave are not more inviolable,—for the beginnings, like the endings, of life are lost in darkness. ”

“ Also behold the company without number of them that be now lost through the mischief of undisposed death. Number the multitude of them, if thou may, and take heed how many there be the which in thy time, dwelling with thee, now be dead and passed hence from this earth. How great a multitude of brethren and fellows, and others of thy knowledge, in so few years be gone before thee — that art yet a young man and left yet on life — and they be dead. ”

“ How quietly others stole away in their youth to the home of the dead, and how the rest have drifted away on the currents of life and are lost to me in the mists and shadows of time. Even the home and the hearth are gone ”

“ Or we count them lost by the crueler death
Of a trust betrayed, or a murdered faith.
Slipping away are the hopes that made
Bliss out of sorrow, and sun out of shade.
Slipping away is our hold on life. ”

“ And that must end us; that must be our cure— To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated Night, Devoid of sense and motion? ”

“ They cling their whole life long painfully to the irrevocable past, to the dream of a lost paradise, the worst and most deadly of all dreams. ”

“ The recollection of her bereavement and the fact of her being utterly alone in life, were the first thoughts that came and the thoughts which dominated. And so it is that all who are called upon to endure a great sorrow, acutely realize that sorrow again and again with each return of the mind to the consciousness of human existence, whether it be after the delerium of fever, the stunning from an accident, or the awaking each morning to daily life. ”

“ He was a lost man—a fact which was quite serious enough for any human being to contemplate with dismay. Lost, tied by a lame leg in a deadly little backwater of the world, where he must remain till he died. ”

“ But as sorrow followed sorrow until all were stricken; as wounds, sickness, imprisonment, and death of friends and relatives cast an ever-lengthening shadow over the spirits of the people; as hopes were dashed by defeat, and the consciousness came that, perhaps, after all the cause was losing, the iron entered into the souls of the people. ”

“ When the sorrows of life the soul o'ercast,
And, sick of the Present, I cling to the Past;
When the eye is suffused with regretful tears,
From the fond recollections of former years;
And shadows of things that have long since fled,
Flit over the brain, like the ghosts of the dead:
Bright visions of glory—that vanished too soon ”

“ I wish we were dead together to-day,
Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight,
Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay,
Out of the world's way, out of the light,
Out of the ages of worldly weather,
Forgotten of all men altogether,
As the world's first dead, taken wholly away,
Made one with death, filled full of the night. ”

“ In that eternal time,
In which my lost hopes find a home,
My spirit knows its clime.
Oh! not myself,— for what am I?—
The worthless and the weak,
Whose every thought of self should raise
A blush to burn my cheek. ”

“ The cares of life faded; misery, distress, hatred, envy, jealousy, and unholy passions, were blotted from existence. Excepting my love for dear ones still earth-enthralled, and the strand of sorrow that, stretching from soul to soul, linked us together, the past became a blank. ”

“ A blundering despatch, mistakenly announcing the death of a friend, occasions the same grief that his Erroneous despatch. real death would bring. You think your anguish is occasioned by your loss. Another despatch, correcting the mistake, heals that grief, and you learn that your suffering was merely the result of your belief. Thus it is with all sorrow, sickness, and death. You will learn at length that there is no cause for grief, and divine Wisdom will then be understood. Error, not Truth, produces all the suffering on earth. ”

“ And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,—all sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had hated,—struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,—this dream where such resurrections were possible. ”

“ And even in those earlier crises, which are but types of death—when we are cut off abruptly from the life we have known, when we can no longer expect tomorrow to resemble yesterday, and find ourselves by some sudden shock on the confines of the unknown—there is often the same sort of lightning-flash through the dark and unfrequented chambers of memory. ”

“ And though the thought of death, and the particular disaster that had befallen him fell upon his spirit sometimes with a shadow that plunged the whole world into desperate darkness, he could not deny that the shadow was gradually lifting, and the character of the agony that had desolated him was becoming less spontaneous, till, in the end, it became almost a calculable emotion that might be indulged or banished at will. ”

“ Unless Wrong, Discord, and Death, are the normal permanent condition of things, then sorrow, too, is not the normal permanent state of the heart; but this merely remains a question, and to its answer no reason helps us. Age after age has passed with no variation in the fell discord of its wails, tears, and groans. Generation has followed in the footsteps of generation, but with no rift in the gloomy shadow of death that has overhung and finally settled over each. Six thousand years of mourning leave unaided Reason with poor hope of any change in the future,—of any expectation of true comfort. ”

“ In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day ”

“ Chapter 30 gives a vivid representation of the mental sufferings of the lost in their mournful habitation, their own sufferings being augmented by the company of others in like case, and by a restless longing for the coming of Doom to end their suspense. ”

“ Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die;
Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of Man
Which God inspired, cannot together perish
With this corporeal clod; then, in the grave,
Or in some other dismal place, who knows
But I shall die a living death? O thought
Horrid, if true! Yet why? It was but breath
Of life that sinned; what dies but what had life
And sin? The body properly had neither,
All of me then shall die: let this appease
The doubt, since human reach no further knows.
For though the Lord of all be infinite,
Is his wrath also? Be it, Man is not so,
But mortal doomed. ”

“ There have been hours in my unhappy life, many of them, when the contemplation of death as the end of earthly sorrow—of the grave as a resting place for the tired and worn out body—has been pleasant to dwell upon. ”

“ These words but reflect the thoughts of thousands, who, wearily struggling along the path of life, ask themselves wonderingly, “Why existence, if this is all it brings?” Many a tired and saddened soul has lain itself down to die, with the undefined feeling that the wasted life left behind might not have been if only—only—ay, if only what? ”

“ I've lost everything in this world, and it's clean gone, forever,—and now I can't lose Heaven, too; no, I can't get to be wicked, besides all!" ”

“ Death had disdained her, and she was now wandering about alone with the vast world as a tomb and a solitude, and a broken heart and the fate of an outcast, and the undying gnawing remorse for company, with for the sustentation of her living body the money she had devised for its decay. ”

“ I continued, "what I had in mind to say was concerning our dead selves. The old phrase, life is a continual dying, is true, and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has been gathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, that we can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the dead selves which once we were." ”