Desperado

“ In a dark phalanx rose before her mind tales of sorrow and wrong; pallid faces passed her by, tones of bitter misery rang in her ears. She covered her face with her hands. "They are the many," she cried, "the great multitude! Why should any think to be happy? God help us! for this is a dreary world." The words were spoken half aloud, for in the momentary despair she had forgotten everything but this—the aching of her own heart, the sadness of a hope-forsaken world. ”

“ We look out on the great, wide world of men,
And, smiling, lean toward a bright to-morrow,
Then backward shrink, with sudden keen regret,
To find that we are learning to forget:
Ah! then we face the saddest hour of sorrow. ”

“ The boding spirit sunk, with woe distrest,
And down the check, the floods of sorrow prest;
At last my closing eye forgot to weep,
And o'er it past the viewless wand of sleep.
Dark visions came, all broken and distrest,
Uncalled, unsought, the enemies of rest;
Such as wild fever draws in fearful guise,
Before the restless mourner's half-clos'd eyes. ”

“ Till, desperate, he staked all on one cast,
And lost—was ruined—and fell down as slain,
Life, fortune, seeming at a moment past,
Like gambling pledges raked from Earth's rich hoard
By Death's strong hand, whose gains are ne'er restored. ”

“ And so, reconvinced of its emptiness, he would to his ravings again.
Well, the tumultuous time passed, and was succeeded in due course by a sad and settled resignation. The habit of sorrow comes, like other habits, to fit the more easily the longer it is worn. There was reached a day of half sweet, half melancholy reveries, when past joys began to assume an air of dim peacefulness, more of regret than of anguish. Old looks, old tones took on a mystic glamour, like happy things remembered from a dream. ”

“ All low desires submerged and in an ecstasy that was not joy but perfect clarity he saw the misery and sorrow of the world, sounding its deeps of agony and loss, the ruin wrought by age, disease, and death,—the hopeless dark beyond. ”

“ O wavering hope of this world’s bliss,
How shall men trow in thee?
My Grove of Gems is gone away
For mine eyes no more to see!
O well were I from the World away.
Each hour the while my life shall last
Remembereth him alone,
Such heavy sorrow have I got
From our meeting long agone.
O well were I from the World away.
O, early in the morning-tide
Men cry: “Christine the fair,
Art thou well content with that true love
Thou sittest loving there?” ”

“ The air of desertion struck him even as he landed; and is there not some secret magic in the vicinity of life, of living people, which gives the soul to the dwelling-place? Have we to more than cross the threshold of the forsaken house to feel its desertion,—to know that our echoing step will track us along stair and corridor, and that through the thin streaks of light between the shutters phantoms of the absent will flit or hover, while the dimly descried objects of the room will bring memories of bright mornings and of happy eves? ”

“ Vague and far-off, and fixt as fate,
Which hide from sight that land unknown
Where, ever, like a carven stone
The setting sun doth stand and wait,
And men cry not: "Too late! too late!"
And sorrow turns to a golden gloom. ”

“ In their touching pathos we seem to hear the sob of natural sorrow for the loved and lost, “the fall of kisses on unanswering clay,” the throbbings of the human heart in the hour of its deepest emotion, when the parting pang unseals the founts of feeling in the soul. ”

“ In this cycle of great sorrow for the moments that we last
[14] We too shall be linked by weeping to the greatness of her past:
But the coming race shall know not, and the fount of tears shall dry,
And the arid heart of man be arid as the desert sky. ”

“ How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one's own hapless heart—to return from the land of deceptive dreams, to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!—Thus was it with me, now, and for ever! ”

“ And on thine own, upturn'd—alas, in sorrow!
Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight—
Was it not Fate, (whose name is also Sorrow,)
That bade me pause before that garden-gate,
To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses!
No footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,
Save only thee and me. ”

“ Dust's your wages, son of sorrow,
But men may come to worse than dust.
Souls undone, undoing others, --
Long time since the tale began.
You would not live to wrong your brothers:
Oh lad, you died as fits a man. ”

“ You shall see cities, ships, people. You shall have anything your heart craves. All the shame and sorrow of your life shall be forgotten—as if they had never been. This is how much I'd leave you here alone—you sad-eyed girl. ”

“ But after that exciting prelude, when the moon had set and slow dawn, like a lifting curtain, had been drawn to reveal the landscape of a world outside the little chamber of my own being, I had been cast from my heights of exaltation into a gloomy pit of disgrace. Fate, with a fastidious particularity, had hauled me back to the things of everyday. ”

“ Then turning from the sight, he rushed away, not caring whither, sobbing such sobs as the lost souls in hell may sob in their despair—a dreadful sobbing, that told of a hopeless agony too intense to be endured for long by weak human flesh. ”

“ Their sorrow is vain, for, like that of Judas, it is the sorrow of despair. "During life," these lost sinners will say to themselves, "I loved ease and comfort and luxury, fine garments, costly jewellery and princely mansions. ”

“ To contemplate the procession that passes daily beneath my window, with its ever-shifting pictures of sorrow, of decrepitude ill-matched with want, new motherhood, and mendicancy, with uplifted eye and palm—to look down upon all this with only a passing sigh, as my worthy but material fat landlady does, would imply a spiritual blindness infinitely worse than the pang which the keener perception induces. ”

“ To afford me repose, I was furnished with dried sugar-canes, and was ill supplied nightly with coarse flesh and water—the cheering delusions of hope no longer lightened my imagination, and I abandoned all human projects for ever. ”

“ And in despair had cast him down to die;
Its leaves which had outlived the frost, the thaw
Had blighted as a heart which hatred’s eye
Can blast not, but which pity kills; the dew
Lay on its spotted leaves like tears too true. ”

“ I'll find a deep depression in a hill,
And to the wind's white songs, the drip of dew.
Call all lost, joyous hearts to dance their fill,
So passers-by shall wonder, pausing there.
Remembering joy before man knew despair. ”

“ There are two thoughts in this verse which seem to me to be fraught with comfort and hope to us as we gather round this grave. There is the thought of rest. "They rest from their labors." Bethink you of the long life marked by the discipline of sorrow, and by those unwearied labors for others. ”

“ The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference. I am of kin to the sod, and partake largely of its dull patience,—in winter expecting the sun of spring. In my cheapest moments I am apt to think that it is n't my business to be "seeking the spirit," but as much its business to be seeking me. ”

“ Not one whose sorrow-swoln and aching eye
For social scenes, for life's endearments fled,
Shall drop a tear and dwell upon the dead!
Poor wretched Outcast! I will weep for thee,
And sorrow for forlorn humanity. ”

“ Let the dust of oblivion cover them; I would not pain another by the recital. There are sorrows—short ages of agony—into the dark origin of which none would dare to pry: one heart alone feels, hides, and nourishes them for ever! ”

“ Sad mother, whose rose of life was crushed before it had budded, tender young lips that had drunk the cup of sorrow to the dregs, while their cup of bliss should hardly yet be brimmed for life's sweet springtime, your crumbling fanes and broken arches and prostrate columns lie not among the ruins of Time. ”

“ Standing between thy poor tempted creatures and the worst sorrow that can befall them—a sorrow that softens, not like others, as death approaches, but is transformed, and stands like a giant at the bedside. ”

“ Hangs o'er the waters of the restless main.
In deep depression sunk, the enfeebled mind
Will to the deaf cold elements complain,
And tell the embosom'd grief, however vain,
To sullen surges and the viewless wind. ”

“ 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 ”

“ What worlds within worlds, all apparently full of necessity, contention, binding emotions and unities—and all with sorrow, their sorrow—a vague, sad something out of far-off things which had been there, and was here in this strong bright city day, had been there and would be here until this odd, strange thing called life had ended. ”

“ And yet each whispering wind has blown
Abroad the story of my shame.
I dread to see men shrink away
With startled looks of scorn or fear,
When in life’s crowded marts some day,
That name falls on their ear. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How empty seem all earthly honors in view of such sharp contrasts. The lesson sank deep, and can never be forgotten. Looking over the leaves of my diary kept during that eventful year, I find recorded there a sorrowful incident that occurred during the winter, bringing desolation to a rich man's home and grief to many loving friends. ”

“ You talk of "permanent views and future comfort"—not for me, for I am dead to hope. The inquietudes of the last winter have finished the business, and my heart is not only broken, but my constitution destroyed. I conceive myself in a galloping consumption, and the continual anxiety I feel at the thought of leaving my child, feeds the fever that nightly devours me. ”

“ And yet that desolation was writing its impress on her brain, giving to the inner life the images of dreary hopelessness that belonged for the moment to the outer.
The young girl scarcely saw the leafless giants shivering in their nakedness, or the leaden clouds driving restlessly over the sky, or the dark sea moaning, plunging like a mighty [Pg 439] thing tied down—a power compelled by a higher power to miserable inaction; yet these things were with and around her; they helped to call that deep look into her eyes, to cause the impatient sigh that escaped her now and then. ”

“ With you I have travelled through the vale of tears: you, like misery personified, have held the cup of sorrow; have fed me with affliction, strewed thorns beneath my feet by day, and wound adders round my pillow by night. Absence itself cannot afford a cure. ”

“ I well know that your departure will cost me my life; but the severest pangs that I shall suffer will be in dying for an ungrateful man, who abandons me at the very time that I stand most in need of his assistance. ”

“ Sadder scene there is not than a ruined rose-garden and a deserted house, given over to mice and rats, where once there was laughter and the shouts of children, and good talk between brave men. One thing alone is sadder—the deserted spiritual life. ”

“ Scarce heeding whither, desolate I stray;
For me, pale Eye of Evening, thy soft light
Leads to no happy home; my weary way
Ends but in sad vicissitudes of care:
I only fly from doubt—to meet despair! ”

“ There, too, shall we know the wherefore of our sorrow at which, sad-eyed, we now so often wonder: there shall we kiss the rod that smote us, and learn the glorious uses and pluck the glowing fruits of an affliction, that on earth filled us with such sick longing, and such an aching pain. ”

“ And here, on the threshold of his new life, I find, to my deep regret, that I must leave him. The life becomes too complicated; the interests too numerous; the hopes too lofty and large, to find room in what will generally be considered as a work of fiction. ”

“ After serving for thirty years to be thrust again into bondage where a deeper degradation and sorrow and hopeless toil were to be his portion for the remaining years of his existence. In deep despair and overwhelmed with grief, he made his escape to the woods, determined to put an end to his sorrows by perishing with cold and hunger. ”

“ Sorrow, however, was not the only emotion excited by their departure. Not a few imprecations, fiercely directed against the house that had disinherited them, arose among their dependents as the carriage finally disappeared. ”

“ You are, as usual, the victim of cold and hunger, suffering from destitution and want. Then there are indications of a bold spirit, ambitious and energetic, bursting out through all the gloom of your dark condition, and a small whispered word in your ear, tells you to hope! ”

“ He avoids all conversation, and an attempt to console him would be an insult on the sacredness of his grief. He has tasted celestial joys. He has lost the object of his love, and henceforth the earth is for him a desert. ”