The Golden Censer Part 22

HOW MANY HUSBANDS HAS HE SEEN

follow a drunken wife into a gutter? And, on the contrary, has he not seen the reverse of this sad picture many a time? I heard a Judge say to a poor woman once,--she was all scars: "I would send this woman-beater to the work-house for two hundred days if I did not know you would starve yourself to pay his way out." And then the poor, foolish, faithful heart appealed to his Honor to "spare the man, just once more;"

she was sure he was a little the worse for drink when he misused her.

What does our friend call this thing in woman, if it be not love? The being capable of a wife's love, and a mother's love, and a sister's love, is not much in danger of the criticisms of a man who has only a front-porch knowledge of all her s.e.x!

SICKNESS.

Even with the best of our philosophy we who are well are unable to command at will the feelings of those who are ill. We lie on a bed, racked with the pains of some pa.s.sing affliction, and the chasm which separates us from the hale and hearty seems prodigious. We are led down the stairs, out into the sunlight. The very rays themselves sit heavily upon our shoulders, and nearly crush us to the earth. With those vivid impressions of the terrors of illness, we feel that our brains will remain steeped in memories such as will enable us to appreciate our health if we ever get it again, yea, though we have hardly a crust of bread to spare. But lo! behold us once well again, and we have forgotten our good fortune; at the slightest turn in our personal affairs we bemoan our fate as sharply as though the whole night had been rolling in upon us through some fever, or all the blasts of the arctic world had crept through our bones in some frigid chill. There is no boon so great as health. Of course everybody _admits_ that. But why can we not attach meaning to it? If a man rise in a public gathering and say "I will give a hundred dollars!" he knows exactly what he is saying, and so do his hearers know. But if he rise behind a pulpit or on a rostrum and say

"PRESERVE YOUR HEALTH

at all hazards!" no significance so deep attaches, though the one statement is a thousand times as important as the other. I cannot understand why we are so oblivious to the sufferings of illness while we are well unless it be a provision of nature to keep us from that suffering through sympathy which we would surely undergo if we really had any vivid feeling for the sick. On this earth each one has to do his own suffering--the King in the palace of the royal family and the baby in the hut of the miner. All who are well go their way rejoicing, even having no momentary realization of the state of mind of the disabled a.s.sociate. It may be that this has not always been so, for we inherit a salutation among our other traits which implies a desire to be informed as to the physical condition of the body of the person addressed. Two men of affairs meet. One says:

"HOW ARE YE?"

The other responds: "How are ye? Are you going to be at the meeting to-night?" etc., the conversation being now under full headway. The words indicate that, at one time, they carried a meaning which they have lost. Yet we are not worse than our fathers before us, and are not exceeded in the milk of human kindness. It may be that the old form was such a c.u.mbrous piece of hypocrisy that latter-day people have thrown it off in disgust. Anyway, there is nothing more certain nor more astonishing than that a well man cannot conceive the feelings of a sick man, even though he try, and that those who are sick have to grin and bear it all without any very great affliction falling to the lot of those who stand at the bedside.

BEHOLD THE STRONG MAN IN THE FEVERISH AIR

of the sick-chamber. Last week all his clock-wheels worked with ease, and merrily struck the hours of feast and sleep. Afterward the wheels dragged a little and annoyed him some. Suddenly a whole handful of sand was thrown into the cogs, and the cogs have been grinding it and the hammer striking continuously ever since. His brain is distracted, his soul is sorely perplexed, and his mind is like an infant in house-cleaning time, strangely in the way and infinitely aware of it.

Here lies proud-riding vanity, thrown from his high saddle. Kindnesses are showered on him of which he feels that he deserves few, and yet wants more.

SYMPATHY IS EXPRESSED

for him which greatly moves him, for he is accompanying the words he hears with the ills he feels, while the speaker is speaking a conventionality which he would feel had he the ability. The sick man mentally resolves that all the mistakes of his life shall be corrected if he shall survive, and yet there are few who are able to fulfill the programmes thus formulated--frequently the thriftless man is more prodigal after an illness which has stabbed his pride with an advertis.e.m.e.nt of his indigence than he was before his great vow of future economy was recorded up on the ceiling, where,

IN THE RIFTS OF THE PLASTER,

the Missouri River flows into the Mississippi! Perhaps if the would-be reformer would take a look frequently at those objects in his whilom sick-room which so riveted his fevered attention, some of their old a.s.sociation would return upon him, and do him good. The ancients practiced the memory in this way. After a course of meanderings through a garden, each object represented and recalled some piece of knowledge which it was important the pupil should retain in his mind. "Few persons," says Thomas a Kempis "are made better by the pain and languor of sickness; as few great pilgrims become eminent saints." Here lies your bachelor now. He has always felt that when he got sick he could get his gruel stewed as well by the hired girl of his landlady, as the French say, as by a wife. He lies up there, O, so in need of care and kindness!

HIS BRAGS WERE MADE IN TIME OF STRENGTH,

and he expected to have strength to keep himself stoical. But now he is weak,--weak and truly miserable. He hears the people come in to their supper, go to their rooms, wash, run gayly down-stairs, chat, go down another pair of stairs,--and then come the jarring sounds of plates and knives and spoons, and, worse, the sickening smell of victuals. How can they laugh and joke when he, a man and a brother, lies sick of a fever?

Ah! my friend, it would not be so were you the head of the house. All would be changed. The supper-hour would come with a hush instead of a clatter. The light stol'n forth o' the building would leave the whole house in gloom. And in your selfish soul you would be glad, for G.o.d so made all of us! Now you turn yourself to the wall, and marvel at the lightness of human words and

THE GREEDINESS OF HUMAN WANTS.

You are little to be pitied in justice--greatly, in mercy! Lie there and pity humanity, for they would be all like you, did not they follow in nature's paths, where the roses of the wayside hide more of their ugliness. All I would impose is that you walk where you will look least hideous, even in your own eyes.

As, in Paradise, when Milton was all ablaze with poetic glory, he waved his more than kingly sceptre and thus ushered in the night--

Now came still evening on-- Now glowed the firmament With living sapphires: Hesperus that led The starry host rode brightest--

--So does woman, soft as still Evening, shining as all the starry hosts with goodness and with mercy, come into the night of disease, and soften its harsh desert with the dews of her kindness. Sickness teaches us how good and true is woman, how useful in the world, how necessary to our welfare and proper destiny. If any man have learned this on a sick bed

HE HAS NOT BEEN SICK FOR NAUGHT.

He is a man of progressive ideas and unfolding nature. Sir Walter Scott has put into words a thought that has ever had man's approbation:

O woman! in our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, And variable as the shade By the light, quivering aspen made; When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou!

"It is in sickness," says Hosea Ballou, "that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent one upon another for our comfort and even necessities. This desire, opening our eyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing." "Sickness," says Burton, "puts us in mind of our mortality, and while we drive on heedlessly in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear, and brings us to a sense of our duty." "It is then," says Pliny, "that man recollects there is a G.o.d, and that he himself is but a man. No mortal is then the object of his envy, his admiration, or his contempt."

"In sickness," says Shakspeare, playing with his prepositions, "let me not so much say, 'Am I getting better of my pain?' as 'Am I getting better for it?'"

LET US THEREFORE GIVE UP THE IDEA

of those great reformations which we formulate upon our mattresses of misery, and rather confine ourselves to a few betterments of our lives which are possible. If we are spendthrifts, we should vow to spend our money for goods of more solid worth than a taste of this thing, a whiff of that, or a sight of the other. If we are proud, let us resolve to speak kindly at least to those who have been lately ill. If we are stingy, let us make ready to give, notwithstanding, to those who need as badly as we have needed. If we are doubtful of the goodness of the gentle s.e.x, let us at any rate thereafter except forever their qualities as a faithful succor of

THE MOST MISERABLE OF CREATURES,

a sick man who cannot move from his bed of pain and discontent. If we are impenitent, let us arise out of our wearying couch respectful to those who worship G.o.d, and reverent also before G.o.d in the presence of other worshipers. Perhaps if we aim our sudden goodness at a lower mark, we may make a record that will not entirely proclaim (as the quick eye of Pope has cynically perceived) our unpromising folly, and our unteachable ignorance of human nature.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

SORROW.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.--Shakspeare.

But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn, And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.--Campbell.

Gathering clouds crowd thickest round the tallest mountain, yet do their summits, far up above, forever gaze out upon the undimmed sun. So is it with the great heart smitten with deep sorrow.

There is no soul upon whom the glory of G.o.d's love falls more serenely and uninterruptedly. There is no better friend, no lovelier a.s.sociate.

"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." And comfort does come, in the broad and kindly love and mercy toward humanity which those who have known suffering so frequently evince, "Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls;" says Chapin, "the most ma.s.sive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of heaven." "The echo of the nest-life, the voice of our modest, fairer, holier soul" says Richter, "is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their eye." "Every n.o.ble crown is, and on earth will ever be, a crown of thorns," says Carlyle "Sorrow", says Haunay, with rare knowledge, "turns all the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge."

Sometimes all nature seems to condole with animate woes:

One weeping heart may tone a rural scene To sadness. Reverently the trees will bend; The little stream will sigh, with heaving pulse, And swans, in soft and solemn silence float-- Grief's snowy celebrants.

It is a manifest peculiarity of the human mind to believe that its sorrows should be more enduring than they really are. We have in this phenomenon some of the clearest views of our weakness and inconsistency, for though we deplore the destiny which deals out so much misery to us, yet we despise ourselves, and are also thought somewhat less of by our a.s.sociates, if we do not embalm our griefs and remain a sort of mummy-house above ground until the memory of our friends has grown faulty and unreliable when applied to our affairs. Thus,

A WIFE LOSES HER HUSBAND.