Vesper Talks to Girls

by Laura A. Knott

You read these familiar words of Browning, but you do not believe them. There must be trouble in the world, you say. There must be rebuffs and stings and hardness, and they must be endured; but as to finding good in such things—why pretend it?

But why talk to young people about trouble? It is well that the mind should be filled with happiness and hope, yet to ignore the other and darker side of life does not abolish it. The question of the place of adversity in life is one that has occupied thinking minds ever since the world began; and since no one can hope to escape the common lot it is well to get ready for trouble before it comes. Young people are really no less interested than their elders in serious subjects. They care for the deeper things of life and they long to understand them.

One must be very young, indeed, not to have had some hard experience of one’s own, some disappointment or struggle or sorrow. Sometimes these are troubles that are apparent to all, and our hearts go out in sympathy and in a yearning desire to comfort. Sometimes they are kept close shut from others. “The heart knoweth its own bitterness.” If you have never been called to go through deep waters yourself, perhaps you have had to stand by and suffer in sympathy while some one you loved has done so.

Moreover, youth has its own disappointments, its own griefs and sorrows to bear, often unguessed by those who are older. Did you believe that the world was all goodness, and have you suffered the shock that comes to every sensitive soul upon discovering that it is a very bad as well as a very good world? How can God be in his heaven and all right with the world, when there is so much sorrow and suffering and sin? It takes a long time to think these problems out, and their solution in full comes only with the “years that bring the philosophic mind.” For some it never comes.

Have you lost faith in some one whom you trusted, and are you therefore having a struggle lest you lose all faith in human nature? Or do you distrust yourself and your own powers? While longing with passionate earnestness to be of use to the world, are you standing on the threshold of life all uncertain what place there may be for you or whether there may be any? To all these perplexities often are added religious doubts. One does not know what one may believe and wonders if one may believe anything. Many young people, in their process of adjustment to real life, pass through an experience no less serious than the going down into the “Everlasting No,” described by Carlyle. Many of the interests and the beliefs of childhood are outgrown, while those of mature manhood or womanhood have not yet taken their place and the soul seems adrift. We who are older seldom appreciate either the seriousness or the sacredness of such experiences in the young. One reason why these are often so tragic is that youth lacks the perspective for judging them. There are as yet no long memories. One believes that what is now will always be. There is no remembrance of the conquest of past difficulties by which to judge the present.

So much to show that life is not all sunshine even when we are twenty! But these experiences, tragic as they seem at the time, will, if nobly lived through, bring their own compensation in truer self-knowledge and greater depth and earnestness of character. We learn from them, too, the necessity for readjustment. We learn to adapt ourselves to the real world in which we find ourselves instead of to the unreal world of our dreams.

“I slept and dreamed that life was beauty;

I woke and found that life was duty.”

This process of readjustment involves the reconciling of the two, the discovery that the life of duty to which we wake is at the same time the life of beauty of which we dreamed.

In this process of readjustment, the first thing to learn is that it is not necessary that we should have everything we want. Indeed, it is not necessary that we should be happy. As soon as we recognize that fact we are on the way to happiness. How many spoiled children of indulgent parents there are who do not learn this except through some unhappy experience! How many such have I watched with interest and sympathy when the idea first dawned upon their minds that, perhaps, after all, life was not going to bring them everything they demanded! Their pitifully narrow and selfish ideas must be uprooted and broad and generous ideas must take their place before even a beginning will have been made toward a fruitful life. In a world where none of us can have just what we want, where no life is ever carried out exactly as planned, and where any day may rob us of what we have cherished most, it behooves us to form early in life the habit of making the most of whatever comes our way. Of nothing is this more true than of those things we do not welcome, that seem hard and forbidding. Usually they are not what they seem, but are friends in disguise, as Browning tells us.