After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the shore of the Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had remembered him. One noble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was flowing; but they had no spring.
Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom. And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and prayed: "Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!"
And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him, and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye, tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings, should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life, an everlasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars and wounds and the whole body?
No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort yourselves with saying, "We tenderly loved them, and no one has wounded, save He who now heals them."
[THE BEAUTY OF DEATH IN THE
BLOOM OF YOUTH.]
In the lives both of men and of women, the period of the deepest happiness will be found to be, not that of childhood, but of youth. The joys of childhood are like the spring flowers,--beautiful, but small; like the tinted forget-me-not,--pretty, but without fragrance. The higher and more brilliant joys of knowledge and the affections are as yet undeveloped; the world of the ideal lies wrapped, as it were, in a dark-green bud.
With what other and what brighter radiance is the period of youth encircled!--that heavenly time of our first friendship and our first love,--of our first poem and our first philosophy,--of our first full enjoyment of nature and music and the drama,--of our first castles in the air, and our first vigorous training for active life. And this period is not simply irrecoverable,--that is the case with all past time,--but for the very reason that in its perfect bloom its only office is to minister to the fruits it so beautifully enfolds, it is the highest and the culminating period; for there is necessarily a greater productive force present in the process than in the results of development, in the flower of youth than in the ripeness of manhood. In his more advanced years, one is seldom led to enter upon a new path of knowledge or a higher moral life; but in his youth, one gives himself up, with inextinguishable fire, to some system of philosophy, or some total change in his moral life. It calls for more strength in a man to be converted than to stand still.
As the highest bodily strength and the most perfect health, the probability of the longest life and the greatest beauty,--in short, the best bodily attributes,--belong to the period of youth, so, and for that very reason, the intellectual wealth which comes not by acquisition, but by inheritance, is the largest. Great attainments, experience, and skill are certainly the fruits of age and of labor; but what are these things, compared with the ideal enjoyments which come of the first sciences we study, when the tree of knowledge, grafted upon the tree of life, puts forth its branches,--compared with the delight with which the new truths of geometry, or of philosophy, or of any favorite science new-born to us, fill the soul? For even in science, however far its limits may be pushed, one is ever descending from the height of the ideal to the vulgar level of reality.
Youth is the full moon, illumined by the magic light of the sun. Age is the new moon, upon which the day-earth (life) throws a meagre light.