The animadversions upon the excess of sorrow to which this extract may give rise, must not induce the Memorialist of Dr. Burney to spare herself from their infliction, by withholding what she considers it her bounden duty to produce, a document that strikingly displays his tender parental kindness, his patient wisdom, and his governed sensibility.
“To Miss Burney.
“ * * I am much more afflicted than surprised at the violence and duration of your sorrow for the terrible scenes and events you have witnessed at Chesington; and not only pity you, but participate in all your feelings. Not an hour in the day has passed—as you will some time or other find—since the fatal catastrophe, in which I have not felt a pang for the irreparable loss I have sustained. However, as something is due to the living—there is, perhaps, a boundary at which it is right to endeavour to stop in lamenting the dead. It is very difficult,—as [Pg 320] I have found!—to exceed that boundary in our duty or attention, without its being at the expense of others. I have experienced the loss of one so dear to me as to throw me into the utmost affliction of despondency which can be suffered without insanity. But I had claims on my life, my reason, and my activity, which, joined to higher motives, drew me from the pit of despair, and forced me, though with great difficulty, to rouse and exert every nerve and faculty in answering them.
“It has been very well said of mental wounds, that they must digest, like those of the body, before they can be healed. The poultice of necessity can alone, perhaps, in some cases, bring on this digestion; but we should not impede it by caustics or corrosions. Let the wound be open a due time—but not kept bare with violence.—
“To quit all metaphor, we must, alas! try to diminish our sorrow for one calamity to enable us to support another! A general peace gives but time to refit for new war; a mental blow, or wound, is no more. So far, however, am I from blaming your sorrow on the present occasion, that, in fact, I both love and honour you for it;—and, therefore, will add no more on that melancholy subject. With respect to the other,—&c. &c.
“* * *.”
It would be needless, it is hoped, to say that this mild and admirable exhortation effected fully its benevolent purpose. With grateful tears, and immediate compliance to his will, she hastened to his arms, received his tenderest welcome, and, quitting her chamber seclusion, again joined the family—if not with immediate cheerfulness, at least with composure: and again, upon his motion, and under his loved wing, returned to the world; if not with inward gaiety, with outward, yet true and unaffected gratitude for the kindness with which it received her back again to its circles:—but Mr. Crisp was not less gone, nor less internally lamented!
What the Doctor intimates of the proofs she would one day find of the continual occupation of his thoughts by his departed friend, alludes to an elegy to which he was then devoting every instant he could snatch from his innumerable engagements; and which, as a memorial of his friendship, was soothing to his affliction. It opens with the following lines.
“Elegy on the Death of a Friend.
“The guide and tutor of my early youth,
Whose word was wisdom, and whose wisdom, truth,
Whose cordial kindness, and whose active zeal
Full forty years I never ceas’d to feel;
The Friend to whose abode I eager stole