If you should ever, when you have reached middle age, turn over the diary or the letters you wrote in the hopeful though foolish days when you were eighteen or twenty, you will be aware how quietly and gradually the lesson of Resignation has been taught you. You would have got into a terrible state of excitement, if any one had told you then that you would have to forego your most cherished hopes and wishes of that time; and it would have tried you even more severely to be assured that in not many years you would not care a single straw for the things and the persons who were then uppermost in your mind and heart. What an entirely new set of friends and interests is that which now surrounds you! and how completely the old ones are gone: gone, like the sunsets you remember in the summers of your childhood; gone, like the primroses that grew in the woods where you wandered as a boy! Said my friend Smith to me, a few days ago: "You remember Miss Jones, and all about that? I met her yesterday, after ten years. She is a fat, middle-aged, ordinary-looking woman. What a terrific fool I was!" Smith spoke to me in the confidence of friendship; yet I think he was a little mortified at the heartiness with which I agreed with him on the subject of his former folly. He had got over it completely; and in seeing that he was (at a certain period) a fool, he had come to discern that of which his friends had always been aware. Of course, early interests do not always die out. You remember Dr. Chalmers, and the ridiculous exhibition about the wretched little likeness of an early sweetheart, not seen for forty years, and long since in her grave. You remember the singular way in which he signified his remembrance of her, in his famous and honored age. I don't mean the crying, nor the walking up and down the garden-walk calling her by fine names. I mean the taking out his card: not his carte; you could understand that: but his visiting-card bearing his name, and sticking it behind the portrait with two wafers. Probably it pleased him to do so; and assuredly it did harm to no one else. And we have all heard of the like things. Early affections are sometimes, doubtless, cherished in the memory of the old. But still, more material interests come in, and the old affection is crowded out of its old place in the heart. And so those comparatively fanciful disappointments sit lightly. The romance is gone. The mid-day sun beats down, and there lies the dusty way. When the cantankerous and unamiable mother of Christopher North stopped his marriage with a person at least as respectable as herself, on the ground that the person was not good enough, we are told that the future professor nearly went mad, and that he never quite got over it. But really, judging from his writings and his biography, he bore up under it, after a little, wonderfully well.
But looking back to the days which the old yellow letters bring back, you will think to yourself, Where are the hopes and anticipations of that time? You expected to be a great man, no doubt. Well, you know you are not. You are a small man, and never will be anything else; yet you are quite resigned. If there be an argument which stirs me to indignation at its futility, and to wonder that any mortal ever regarded it as of the slightest force, it is that which is set out in the famous soliloquy in "Cato," as to the Immortality of the Soul. Will any sane man say, that, if in this world you wish for a thing very much, and anticipate it very clearly and confidently, you are therefore sure to get it? If that were so, many a little schoolboy would end by driving his carriage and four, who ends by driving no carriage at all. I have heard of a man whose private papers were found after his death all written over with his signature as he expected it would be when he became Lord Chancellor. Let us say his peerage was to be as Lord Smith. There it was, SMITH, C., SMITH, C., written in every conceivable fashion, so that the signature, when needed, might be easy and imposing. That man had very vividly anticipated the woolsack, the gold robe, and all the rest. It need hardly be said, he attained none of these. The famous argument, you know of course, is, that man has a great longing to be immortal, and that therefore he is sure to be immortal. Rubbish! It is not true that any longing after immortality exists in the heart of a hundredth portion of the race. And if it were true, it would prove immortality no more than the manifold signatures of SMITH, C., proved that Smith was indeed to be Chancellor. No: we cling to the doctrine of a Future Life; we could not live without it; but we believe it, not because of undefined longings within ourselves, not because of reviving plants and flowers, not because of the chrysalis and the butterfly,—but because "our Saviour, Jesus Christ, hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel."
There is something very curious, and very touching, in thinking how clear and distinct, and how often recurring, were our early anticipations of things that were never to be. In this world, the fact is for the most part the opposite of what it should be to give force to Plato's (or Cato's) argument: the thing you vividly anticipate is the thing that is least likely to come. The thing you don't much care for, the thing you don't expect, is the likeliest. And even if the event prove what you anticipated, the circumstances, and the feeling of it, will be quite different from what you anticipated. A certain little girl three years old was told that in a little while she was to go with her parents to a certain city, a hundred miles off,—a city which may be called Altenburg as well as anything else. It was a great delight to her to anticipate that journey, and to anticipate it very circumstantially. It was a delight to her to sit down at evening on her father's knee, and to tell him all about how it would be in going to Altenburg. It was always the same thing. Always, first, how sandwiches would be made,—how they would all get into the carriage, (which would come round to the door,) and drive away to a certain railway-station,—how they would get their tickets, and the train would come up, and they would all get into a carriage together, and lean back in corners, and eat the sandwiches, and look out of the windows, and so on. But when the journey was actually made, every single circumstance in the little girl's anticipations proved wrong. Of course, they were not intentionally made wrong. Her parents would have carried out to the letter, if they could, what the little thing had so clearly pictured and so often repeated. But it proved to be needful to go by an entirely different way and in an entirely different fashion. All those little details, dwelt on so much, and with so much interest, were things never to be. It is even so with the anticipations of larger and older children. How distinctly, how fully, my friend, we have pictured out to our minds a mode of life, a home and the country round it, and the multitude of little things which make up the habitude of being, which we long since resigned ourselves to knowing could never prove realities! No doubt, it is all right and well. Even Saint Paul, with all his gift of prophecy, was not allowed to foresee what was to happen to himself. You know how he wrote that he would do a certain thing, "so soon as I shall see how it will go with me."
But our times are in the Best Hand. And the one thing about our lot, my reader, that we may think of with perfect contentment, is that they are so. I know nothing more admirable in spirit, and few things more charmingly expressed, than that little poem by Mrs. Waring which sets out that comfortable thought. You know it, of course. You should have it in your memory; and let it be one of the first things your children learn by heart. It may well come next after, "O God of Bethel": it breathes the self-same tone. And let me close these thoughts with one of its verses:—
"There are briers besetting every path,
Which call for patient care:
There is a cross in every lot,
And an earnest need for prayer:
But a lowly heart that leans on Thee
Is happy anywhere!"
THE FLAG.
There's a flag hangs over my threshold, whose folds are more dear to me
Than the blood that thrills in my bosom its earnest of liberty;
And dear are the stars it harbors in its sunny field of blue
As the hope of a further heaven that lights all our dim lives through.
But now should my guests be merry, the house is in holiday guise,
Looking out through its burnished windows like a score of welcoming eyes.
Come hither, my brothers who wander in saintliness and in sin!
Come hither, ye pilgrims of Nature! my heart doth invite you in.
My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;
And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;
But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:
Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.
The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath and greed:
Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless creed;
'T was red with the blood of freemen, and white with the fear of the foe,
And the stars that fight in their courses 'gainst tyrants its symbols
know.