Old Misery

“ However, the use of this dreadful word may be reasonably extended to the young who happen to have become essentially old in misery. Intensity of a suffering existence may compensate the want of extension; and a boundless depth of misery may be a transformed expression for a boundless duration of misery. The most aged person, to all appearance, that ever came under my eyes, was an infant—hardly eight months old. ”

“ Could the countless unselfish ones, the sufferers, “the great despisers,” who bore so many miseries, that we, their descendants, might pass gaudy and comfortable days—could they but know how golden a thing their misery purchased, the memory of the old torture and the old injustice would be soothing and gentle like a charity. ”

“ Thus misery weighs down my declining years; and I live in torturing doubt as to my child, my Ellinor. Last night I was diseovered by some peasants at my favourite occupation in the Abbey ruins. I will not be a theme for babbling tongues; I have taken my old domestic with me, and I quit this place, perhaps, for ever.———Will you, then, pity a miserable old man, and commiserate his fate. ”

“ THE OLD MAN’S STORY CONTINUED—MISERY IN THE HEAD—THE STRANGE MARKS—TEA-DEALER FROM LONDON—DIFFICULTIES OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE.
After another pause the old man once more resumed his narration:—“If ever there was a man perfectly miserable it was myself, after the loss of that cherished woman. ”

“ I have seen wickedness triumphant, proud, rich, self-sufficient; and I have seen men and women struggling almost against hope—save that one blessed anchor of the human soul, the expectation of a joyful resurrection. I have seen untold misery such as you cannot conceive, and I have seen what is far worse than misery, human souls carried on to ruin by the mad thirst for pleasure. O sad earth! ”

“ When's Misery going back to camp?”
“To-morrow, he 'lows. Told the girl to start in the morning. He's on a little spree. Claimed in here the trip to the bay broke up the one he had started on after selling the last bear.” ”

“ MISERY his heart hath broken—
Misery is mystery!
Let the sad one lonely be;
As the Ancients shunned the token
Of a lightning-blasted tree.
II.
Breathe no word, his doom is spoken—
Misery is mystery!
By its scathing lightning fated,
Human hearts are consecrated,
For a higher destiny.
[Pg 110]
FAREWELL
LET mine eyes the parting take,
Which my faint lips never can;
Moments such as these might break
Even the sternest heart of man.
Mournfully doth Joy's eclipse,
Shroud in grief Love's sweetest sign;
Cold the pressure of thy lips,
Cold the hand that rests in mine. ”

“ But of her far keener suffering, for the loss she had sustained, little shew was made; for real misery delights not in reproaches and complaints. It is like charity and love—silent, long suffering and mild. ”

“ It is not occasionally that he has heard from trembling lips the tale of woe, and seen its painful and often hideous signs. It has been with him an almost every day occurrence. Misery on every hand has made its appeal to him. ”

“ Let loose the wildest imagination into the realms of wildest wickedness, and yet they dared not, as they feared God, to credit for a moment the union of such appalling and such paltry guilt, in that man who now trembled not before them, but who seemed cut off from all the sensibilities of this life by the scythe of Misery that had shorn him down! ”

“ The blow that lays the heart in twain: it kills. Let be mine which will; it is the one that counts.
If Misery kill a man, that ends it. But Misery seldom deals so summarily with his victims. And while they are spared to earth, we find them usually sustaining life after the accepted fashion. ”

“ But this I do assert that no one has ever lost so much and no one has ever fallen into such a depth of misery. Time too, instead of lightening my grief, can but add to it: for other sorrows lose their sting as time passes, but my sorrow can but grow daily, as I feel my present misery and think on my past happiness. ”

“ He was thinking, as he stood above the grave of fifteen years, how high Disgrace and Misery had heaped the mound. So bitterly he was thinking of the past, it was without desire that he at last arose and faced the future. ”

“ Mere human feelings of pity, sympathy with my too visible agitation, superadded to something of perhaps reverence for the blighting misery that was now opening its artillery upon me—for misery has a privilege, and everywhere is felt to be a holy thing—had combined to procure for me some attention and some indulgence hitherto. ”

“ She saw nothing through her dim eyes, made no motion with her lips, sobbed rather than breathed, endured tearlessly rather than lived awake her misery. Misery is not the word: she had been sent down to hell and had come back dumb to earth, neither knowing why such torment was hers, nor thinking how to fly a second questioning. Had she been capable of a wish, a prayer, or of begging a favour, who can doubt what it would have been? Death, oh, death! ”

“ You have only to go on to the common here, or any other common or town in England, to see too much of them—enough to break one’s heart if—, but I will not hurry on too fast in what I have to say. What I want to make you recollect is, that misery is here round us, in us. A great deal which we bring on ourselves; and a great deal more misery which we do not, as far as we can see, bring on ourselves; but which comes, nevertheless, and lets us know plainly enough that it is close to us. Every man and woman of us have their sorrows. ”

“ Each of you goes through a foolish, innocent routine, with a clear conscience and the applause of the poor multitude; and the result is misery, misery, misery. Not random misery, here and there, such as you harmless creatures might chance on by the way, but a fearful consistent scheme of deeply-calculated, universal misery—a thing of hellish contrivance, worthy of the fiery genius of the sulphur pit. ”

“ Young man, boast not of your fortune, praise not your wealth! I, Misery, have known people who were wiser and richer than you, but I, Misery, have outwitted them. When a great misfortune befell them, they struggled with me unto their death; they were worsted by their luckless plight,—could not get away from me, Misery, until they took their abode in the grave, and I covered them for ever with the earth. ”

“ Would I could foresee a term to our misery!—Who but yourself shall find a remedy for our misfortunes? Shall we delay, until time brings to light that which is now a secret, and the affront we have received entail on us a shame more intolerable than death itself? ”

“ And to herself she cries,
"Oh misery! oh misery!
Oh woe is me! oh misery!"
At all times of the day and night
This wretched Woman thither goes;
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows ”

“ You may be assured of this that very dreadful calamities are coming upon you, calamities that shall carry nothing of support nor comfort in them, but all misery, misery in time, misery to eternity, misery in your outward afflictions, misery in your inward frame and temper of mind, misery in this world, misery in hell. You have not a single instance of misery only coming upon you, but miseries. The ruin of your church and nation is at hand; and there will come a day of wrath, when riches shall not profit men, but all the wicked shall be destroyed. ”

“ The result of all that wealth had been to create a new form of misery, an envious, jealous form of misery, much more cruel than the former one, for it filled the heart with a ferment of hatred, a passion for destruction. ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ Before them love flies aghast, and the tenderest emotions of the heart fall withered. Could the annals of human misery be fairly written, it might appear that not all the lusts and crimes which are daily blazoned to the eye have wrought such wide-spread misery, have inflicted such general unhappiness, as these sins of temper, so common in their operation that they pass almost unrebuked, but so wide-spread in their effects that their havoc is discovered in every feature of our social life. ”

“ The chain of necessity ever bringing misery must have been broken and the malignant fate that presides over it would not permit this breach of her eternal laws. But why should I repine at this? Misery was my element, and nothing but what was miserable could approach me; if Woodville had been happy I should never have known him. And can I who for many years was fed by tears, and nourished under the dew of grief, can I pause to relate a tale of woe and death? ”

“ The tears which were shed on that day, seemed almost sufficient to wipe away the recollection of those times, in which misery experienced no mitigation; when every one trembling for himself, had no unabsorbed sensation of consoling pity to bestow upon the unfortunate. ”

“ Misery cries out to me from the kerb-stone, despair passes me by in the ways; I discern limbs laden with fetters impalpable, but not imponderable; I hear the shaking of invisible lashes, I see men dabbled with their own oozing life. ”

“ I will tell thee, therefore, my crimes, that thou mayst know thy own felicity, lest, ignorant it means nothing but innocence, thou shouldst lose it, unconscious of its value. Listen then to me, and learn what Misery is! Guilt is alone the basis of lasting unhappiness;—Guilt is the basis of mine, and therefore I am a wretch for ever! ”

“ The poor man fills his waggon, and, on coming out, tells Misery that there is plenty more inside. Misery turns in to see; the ex-pauper thereupon closes up the entrance with the stone, and returns home. ”

“ Yet there lay, underneath his own gloomy agony, a remote consciousness of collateral affliction, such as is frequently experienced by those who may be drawn, by some temporary and present pleasure, from the contemplation of their misery. ”

“ A melancholy spectacle, indeed, was it to behold an entire population so steeped in misery, so utterly inured to wretchedness, that they felt no shame at its exposure, but rather a sort of self-exultation at any opportunity of displaying a more than ordinary amount of human suffering and sorrow;—to hear them how they caressed their afflictions, how they seemed to fondle their misfortunes, vying with each other in calamity, and bidding higher and higher for a little human sympathy. ”

“ At first, while there was yet water on the hillsides and food in the wallets, the host toiled on with only the pitiless summer sun for foe; then, as the little streamlets grew rarer, the dry, dark crags pressed closer, and the food was failing, the misery began. Misery past imagining! for if it is terrible for one mortal to suffer and go out in agony, what is it when hundreds of thousands suffer? when horses and mules are falling like flies by the roadway; when men and women trudge onward like dogs, with their tongues hanging from their mouths ”

“ Opening their eyes in this scene, which the guilty thoughtlessness of successive generations has rendered little better than a vast lazar house, evil example, gloom, unregulated tempers, repining and misery are their first and last spectacles. They advance into life to repeat the errors of their parents, to make common stock of their misery anew, to multiply the number of the unhappy, or perhaps worse, to tenant hospitals, and the receptacles of human ignorance and misery. ”

“ And then, again, on the day when his grandfather turned him out he was only a boy, while now he was a man and felt he was so. Misery—we lay a stress on the fact—had been kind to him; for poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has the magnificent result of turning the whole will to effort and the whole soul to aspiration. ”

“ Let every one, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling. ”

“ We will stretch out our hands too late—when we have been caught in its fatal snares, and then in the darkness and misery that will surround us, we will feel how foolish we have been, and our cries of despair and distress will be echoed back to our own ears in sounds of mockery and scorn. ”

“ Misery, and shame, and horror, and a vain yearning to hide myself from all human eyes, and weep out my life in secret, overcame me. Then, these subsided; and ONE THOUGHT slowly arose in their stead—arose, and cast down before it every obstacle of conscience, every principle of education, every care for the future, every remembrance of the past, every weakening influence of present misery, every repressing tie of family and home, every anxiety for good fame in this life, and every idea of the next that was to come. ”

“ I looked down at myself, then wasted to the bone, a stranger to the taste of wine or tobacco, to all the joys of life, a miserable heart-broken wretch, and I cursed that old man and the thought of him till my lips were dry and my throat ached. I walked back to my miserable dwelling with a red fire before my eyes, muttering, cursing that power which stood behind the universe, and which we call God, that there should be vomited forth into the world day by day, hour by hour, this black stream of human wretchedness, an everlasting mockery to those who would seek for the joy of life. ”

“ When all corrections and deductions are made, a residue of profound, awful, inexplicable misery—misery of sinful man and misery of sinless brutes—remains, alas! to form, doubtless, in time to come, as in the ages which are past, the dread “Riddle of the painful Earth.” We must expect it to press upon us ever more and more in proportion as our sense of justice and love rises higher, and our sympathies with unmerited suffering grow more acute. ”