I was unutterably moved, lately, by the reading of a diary, preserved in MS., of one of the most innocent, holy, and devoted of God’s human children; a creature who entered upon life endowed with good gifts, spiritual, intellectual, and external, and who wasted away in body, dwindled away in mind, and sank early to the grave, clearly through the force given by superstition to a corroding self-consciousness, to which she was by constitution liable. Her diary yields clear lessons which might profitably be made known, but that they are not apparently recognised by those who had the charge of herself in life, and hold her papers now. Among these lessons, one is to our present purpose. Her diary became more and more a register of frames and feelings, each mood of which was fearfully important to herself as a token of God’s dispositions towards her. To an eye which now reads the whole at once, side by side with the dates and incidents of her life, nothing can be clearer than that the risings and fallings of her spiritual state exactly corresponded with the condition of her health. In one portion, the record becomes almost too painful to be borne. While her days were passed in heavenly deeds, and her solitude in prayer, she sinks daily lower and lower in hope and cheer: and at last, after a record of most mournful humiliation, we find a notice which explains all—of the breaking of a blood-vessel. To us it is nothing strange to experience fluctuations of more than spirits—of heart and soul, and to ascertain, after a time, that they were owing to physical causes. We even anticipate these changes, and know that when we awake in the morning, we shall be harassed by such and such a thought; that at such an hour of the day we shall suffer under remorse for such and such an old act and word, or under fear of the consequences of conduct which, at other seasons, we know to be right. We have that to tell of ourselves, which seems as a key to the mournful diary I have mentioned. This experience, and such warnings as that which has so deeply moved me, should teach us the wisdom and duty of not cherishing—by recording—our personal cares, but rather of “casting them upon Him who careth for us.” The most fitting sick-room aspiration is to attain to a trusting carelessness as to what becomes of our poor dear selves, while we become more and more engrossed by the vast interests which our Father is conducting within our view, from the birdie which builds under our eaves, to the gradual gathering of the nations towards the fold of Christ, on the everlasting hills.
SOME GAINS AND SWEETS OF INVALIDISM.
“God Almighty!
There is a soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out!”
Shakspere.
“Yet have they special pleasures, even mirth,
By those undreamt of who have only trod
Life’s valley smooth; and if the rolling earth
To their nice ear have many a painful tone,
They know man does not live by joy alone,
But by the presence of the power of God.”
Milnes.
“But here we are;—that is a great fact; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself is here; and art and nature, hope and dread, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.” Emerson.
It is harder to be brief about our gains and privileges than about our peculiar troubles: but I must try to be so; for the discoveries we make, though to us all glowing with freshness and beauty, are, to those who merely receive them, as trite as any old moralities whatever.
One great and strange blessing to us is, the abolition of the future—of our own future in this life.
It is commonly thought a chief privilege of childhood, that it is passed without thought of the future—that the present is all in all. I doubt the truth of this. My own experience in childhood was of a painful and incessant longing for the future—a longing which enhanced all its innumerable pains, and embittered many of its pleasures—a longing for strength of body and of mind, for independence of action—for an escape, in short, from the conditions of childhood. The privilege which I then missed I have found now. Let it be a comfort to all sorrowing friends of those who are under any sort of doom without an assigned period to know, that in such cases the sense of doom vanishes. When the future becomes a blank to us, it becomes presently invisible. And when we sustain this change we do not contract in our desires and interests, but, I humbly hope, the contrary. The thoughts which stretched forwards, with eagerness and anxiety, now spread themselves abroad, more calmly and with more disinterestedness. There is danger of our losing sympathy with the young, the healthy, the ambitious; for we soon require to be reminded of those states of mind, and those classes of interests which involve ambition, or any kind of personal regard to the future: but, if we can preserve these sympathies, it does appear to me that the change is, to ourselves, pure gain. The image of five, ten, twenty years of our present life, or decline into deeper suffering, ending in death, makes absolutely no impression upon us. We have not the slightest movement of a wish that it were otherwise;—we do not turn our heads half round to see if there be no way of escape: and this is because our interests are all occupied with immediate and pressing objects, in which we have ascertained our true life to consist. Of these objects we would not surrender one for the permission to go back to the most brilliant point of our lives. Wealth would be a trouble to us—a responsibility we would rather decline; and it is astonishing to us that any man can wish for more than is needed to furnish his children well for the probation of life. Ambition and its objects (of course, not including usefulness) appear to us so much voluntarily incurred bondage and fatigue. Subjection to the opinions of men—a dependence on their suffrages for any heartfelt object—seems a slavery so humbling and so unnecessary, that we could hardly wonder sufficiently at it, but for the recollection that all human desires and passions are the instruments by which the work of the race is done, and that ambition is far from being among the lowest of these instruments. Those of us who had known formerly, for a sufficient length of time, what it was to have fame, did not need to be laid by to discover how soon and how thoroughly it becomes disregarded (except for its collateral privileges), and left behind among our forgotten objects of desire: but our present position is the best for following out its true history—for tracing that path a reach beyond the point where moralists commonly leave it. The young aspirant is warned betimes, without practical effect, that the privileges of obscurity are irrecoverable: that, when he has become famous, he may long in vain for the quiet shelter of privacy, that he has left. He feels this, with a sense of panic, when he has gained the celebrity he longs for, and is undergoing his first agonies from adverse opinion. If he would but believe us, we watchers could tell him that, though he can never retreat into his original privacy, there is a yet more complete shelter before him, if he does not linger, or take up his rest short of his journey’s end. This shelter is not to be found in indifference, in contempt for human opinion—that ugly mask behind which some strive to hide the workings of an agonised countenance, while the scorchings of scorn beat fiercely on their brains, and the jeerings of ridicule torture their ears. There is no rest, no shelter, in contempt: and human opinion can never be naturally despised, though it has no claim to any man’s allegiance. The true and welcome ultimate shelter of the celebrated is in great interests—great objects. If they use the power their fame puts into their hands for the furtherance of any of the great ends for which Providence is operating, they find themselves by degrees in possession once more of the external freedom, the internal quiet, the genuine privacy of soul, which they believed forfeited for ever, while the consciousness of the gaze of the world was upon them. They read what is said of themselves in print just as if it was said of any other person, if it be laudatory; and with a quieter feeling still if it be adverse, as I shall presently describe.
It is sometimes said, that it is a pity when great men do not happen to die on the completion of the one grand achievement of their lives, instead of taming down the effect by living on afterwards like common men;—that Clarkson should have died on the abolition of the slave-trade,—Howard after his first or second journey,—Scott on the publication of his best romance,—and so on. But there is a melo-dramatic air about such a wish, which appears childish to moral speculators. We are glad to have Clarkson still, to honour freshly in his old age. We see more glory about the head of John Quincy Adams contending, as a Representative in Congress, for popular rights, than he ever wore as President of the United States. We should be glad that Rowland Hill should live and work as a common man for a quarter of a century after the complete realisation of his magnificent boon to society. In truth, we behold great men entering early upon their heaven, when we see them tranquilly retired, or engaged in common labours, after their most memorable task is accomplished. The worthiest of celebrated men would, I believe, be found, if their meditations could be read, anticipating with the highest satisfaction, as the happiest part of their prospect beyond the grave, their finding a level condition once more—being encompassed by equals—or, as the popular preacher puts it, starting fair from the new post. Such being the natural desire of simple hearts, there is a pleasure to spectators in seeing them, while still here, encompassed with fellowship—not set above, nor apart, though enjoying the natural recompenses of their deeds.