To a lone man it comes not near; for how can trial take hold where there is nothing by which to try?
A funeral? You reason with philosophy. A graveyard? You read Hervey and muse upon the wall. A friend dies? You sigh, you pat your dog—it is over. Losses? You retrench—you light your pipe—it is forgotten. Calumny? You laugh—you sleep.
But with that childless wife clinging to you in love and sorrow—what then?
Can you take down Seneca now, and coolly blow the dust from the leaf-tops? Can you crimp your lip with Voltaire? Can you smoke idly, your feet dangling with the ivies, your thoughts all waving fancies upon a church-yard wall—a wall that borders the grave of your boy?
Can you amuse yourself by turning stinging Martial into rhyme? Can you pat your dog, and seeing him wakeful and kind, say, “It is enough?” Can you sneer at calumny, and sit by your fire dozing?
Blessed, thought I again, is the man who escapes such trial as will measure the limit of patience and the limit of courage!
But the trial comes—colder and colder were growing the embers.
That wife, over whom your love broods, is fading. Not beauty fading—that, now that your heart is wrapped in her being, would be nothing.
She sees with quick eye your dawning apprehension, and she tries hard to make that step of hers elastic.
Your trials and your loves together have centered your affections. They are not now as when you were a lone man, wide-spread and superficial. They have caught from domestic attachments a finer tone and touch. They cannot shoot out tendrils into barren world-soil and suck up thence strengthening nutriment. They have grown under the forcing-glass of home-roof, they will not now bear exposure.