Character and Conduct Part 40

Unrequited Love

SEPTEMBER 2

"Infancy? What if the rose-streak of morning Pale and depart in a pa.s.sion of tears?

Once to have hoped is no matter for scorning: Love once: e'en love's disappointment endears, A moment's success pays the failure of years."

R. BROWNING.

"It looks like a waste of life, that mowing down of our best years by a relentless pa.s.sion which itself falls dead on the top of them. But it is not so. Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long run for having once in a lifetime 'let out all the length of the reins.'"

_Red Pottage_, MARY CHOLMONDELEY.

Bereavement

SEPTEMBER 3

"If we still love those we lose, can we altogether lose those we love?"

_The Newcomes_, THACKERAY.

"They that love beyond the World cannot be separated by it.

"Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship.

"If Absence be not Death, neither is it theirs.

"Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still.

"For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent.

"In this Divine Gla.s.s they see Face to Face; and their converse is Free as well as Pure.

"This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal."

WILLIAM PENN.

Bereavement

SEPTEMBER 4

"Parting and forgetting? What faithful heart can do these? Our great thoughts, our great affections, the Truths of our life, never leave us.

Surely they cannot separate from our consciousness; shall follow it whithersoever that shall go; and are of their nature divine and immortal."

THACKERAY.

"I can only say that I sympathise with your grief, and if faith means anything at all it is trusting to those instincts, or feelings, or whatever they may be called, which a.s.sure us of some life after this."

_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.

"What is it when a child dies? It is the great head-master calling that child up into his own room, away from all the under-teachers, to finish his education under his own eye, close at his feet. The whole thought of a child's growth and development in heaven instead of here on earth, is one of the most exalting and bewildering on which the mind can rest."

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Death of Young Children

SEPTEMBER 5

"Nothing is left or lost, nothing of good Or lovely; but whatever its first springs Has drawn from G.o.d, returns to Him again."

_On an Early Death_, TRENCH.

"When one comes to the loss of young children--a sad perplexity--let it not be forgotten that they were given. If in the hour of bitterest grief it were asked of a bereaved mother whether she would prefer never to have possessed in order that she might never have lost--her heart would be very indignant. No little child has ever come from G.o.d and stayed a brief while in some human home--to return again to the Father--without making glad that home and leaving behind some trace of heaven. A family had counted themselves poorer without those quaint sayings, those cunning caresses, that soft touch, that sudden smile. This short visit was not an incident: it was a benediction. The child departs, the remembrances, the influence, the a.s.sociations remain. If one should allow us to have Sarto's Annunciation for a month, we would thank him: when he resumed it for his home he would not take everything, for its loveliness of maid and angel is now ours for ever. And if G.o.d recalls the child He lent, then let us thank Him for the loan, and consider that what made that child the messenger of G.o.d--its purity, modesty, trustfulness, gladness--has pa.s.sed into our soul."

_The Potter's Wheel_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 6

"The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:-- They have forged our chains of being for good or ill And their invisible hands these hands yet hold.

Our perishable bodies are the mould In which their strong imperishable will-- Mortality's deep yearning to fulfil-- Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.

"Vibrations infinite of life in death, As a star's travelling light survives its star!

So may we hold our lives, that when we are The fate of those who then will draw this breath, They shall not drag us to their judgment bar, And curse the heritage which we bequeath."

MATHILDE BLIND.

"We are learning, by the help of many teachers, the extent and the authority of the dominion which the dead exercise over us, and which we ourselves are shaping for our descendants.

"We feel, as perhaps it was impossible to feel before, how at every moment influences from the past enter our souls, and how we in turn scatter abroad that which will be fruitful in the distant future. It is becoming clear to us that we are literally parts of others and they of us."

Bishop WESTCOTT.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 7