Pleasure, a laughing, lavish courtesan, gay, gaudy, thoughtless, slave to the impression of the hour. This last you may buy at your will for a handful of silver, or, at most, a talent of gold; and there are few, alas! who have not learned how soon her false smile palls upon the fancy, her painted cheek grows irksome to the eye. The second you must woo, with many a stealthy footstep, many a cringing bow, offering at her shrine truth, honour, self-respect, to find, if you are so fortunate as not to be discarded like a pair of worn-out gloves, that you have only gathered a nut without a kernel, after all. For the first, you must serve as Jacob served, through long years of labour, patience, and self-denial; but when you have won your Rachel at last, she discloses for you all her glorious, unfading beauty, cleaving to you, true and constant, through good and evil, the warmth and comfort of your hearth, the light of your happy home.
“When the courtesan has been paid off and dismissed in early youth, the haughty lady wooed through long years of manhood, and won, to be despised, in middle life, this is the goddess you claim to be your bride, and once wedded, you will never leave her till you die.
“The Isthmian crown was indeed woven from humble parsley, but do you think it could have borne a higher value had every leaf consisted of beaten gold? Which would you rather wear, the bronze Victoria Cross, or the Star and Ribbon of the Garter? Depend upon it, that to the young champion of the games, flushed, exulting, treading upon air, that vegetable coronal represented everything most desirable and precious in earth or heaven. No; it is the old experienced athlete, the winner of a thousand prizes, who has learned the intrinsic value of the article, and who knows that its worth consists not in itself, nor even in the victory it represents, but in the strength of frame, the speed of foot attained by training for its pursuit. From many a long summer’s day of toil and abstinence, from panting lungs and aching muscles, from brows covered with sweat, and feet with dust, he has wrested the endurance of the camel, the strength of the ox, and the footfall of the deer. Does he grudge his past labour? Not he, thankful that he has been ‘through the mill.’
“I grant you the process is not entirely pleasant; I grant you that effort is with many men a sensation of discomfort almost amounting to pain; that self-denial is very difficult to most, disappointment simply disgusting to all. When the body feels weary, the brain overtasked, we are apt to think the meal is being bolted too fine, the grinding becoming unnecessarily severe; above all, when that pitiless millstone comes crushing down upon the heart, and pounds it to powder, we cry aloud in our agony, and protest that no sorrow was ever so unbearable as ours. What mole working underground is so blind as humanity to its own good? Why, that same grinding to powder is the only means by which the daintiest flour can be obtained. The finest nature, like the truest steel, must be tempered in the hottest furnace; so much caloric would be thrown away on an inferior metal. Capacity for suffering infers also capacity for achievement; and who would grudge the pain about his brows, when it reminded him he was wearing an imperial crown?
“Sooner or later the process must be undergone by all. With some it goes on through a lifetime; others get the worst of it over in a few years. One man may have done with it altogether before his strength of mind or body has failed with declining age—
‘Dum nova canities—dum prima et recta senectus.’
“His neighbour may have one foot in the grave before the grain has been thoroughly purged and sifted, and refined to its purest quality, but through the mill he must pass. It is just as much a necessity of humanity as hunger or thirst, or sorrow or decay. There is no escape. However long protracted, it is inexorable, unavoidable, and effectual, for
‘Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small.’”