The Project Gutenberg eBook of Life in the sick-room
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Life in the sick-room
Essays: Second Edition
Author: An Invalid
Release date: August 14, 2024 [eBook #74254]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Edward Moxon, 1844
Credits: Charlene Taylor, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE IN THE SICK-ROOM ***
MAY 1, 1845.
A LIST OF BOOKS
RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY
EDWARD MOXON, 44, DOVER STREET.
DRAMATIC LIBRARY.
I.
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. With an INTRODUCTION. BY GEORGE DARLEY. In
two volumes, 8vo, with Portraits and Vignettes, price 32_s._ cloth.
II.
SHAKSPEARE. With REMARKS on his LIFE and WRITINGS. BY THOMAS
CAMPBELL. In one volume, 8vo, with Portrait, Vignette, and Index,
price 16_s._ cloth.
III.
BEN JONSON. With a MEMOIR. BY WILLIAM GIFFORD. In one volume, 8vo,
with Portrait and Vignette, price 16_s._ cloth.
IV.
MASSINGER AND FORD. With an INTRODUCTION. BY HARTLEY COLERIDGE. In
one volume, 8vo, with Portrait and Vignette, price 16_s._ cloth.
V.
WYCHERLEY, CONGREVE, VANBRUGH, AND FARQUHAR. With BIOGRAPHICAL and
CRITICAL NOTICES. BY LEIGH HUNT. In one volume, 8vo, with Portrait
and Vignette, price 16_s._ cloth.
VI.
SHERIDAN’S DRAMATIC WORKS. With a BIOGRAPHICAL and CRITICAL SKETCH.
By LEIGH HUNT. Price 5_s._ 6_d._ cloth.
ROGERS’S POEMS.
I.
ROGERS’S POEMS. A NEW EDITION; In one
volume, illustrated by 72 Vignettes, from designs by Turner
and Stothard, price 16_s._ boards.
II.
ROGERS’S ITALY. A NEW EDITION. In one
volume, illustrated by 56 Vignettes, from designs by Turner
and Stothard, price 16_s._ boards.
III.
ROGERS’S POEMS; AND ITALY. In two
pocket volumes, illustrated by numerous Woodcuts, price 10_s._
cloth.
WORDSWORTH’S POEMS.
I.
WORDSWORTH’S POETICAL WORKS. In
six volumes, price 30_s._ cloth.
II.
WORDSWORTH’S POEMS, chiefly of early and
late Years, including “THE BORDERERS,” a Tragedy. In one
volume, price 9_s._ cloth.
III.
WORDSWORTH’S SONNET& In one Volume,
price 6_s._ cloth.
IV.
WORDSWORTH’S EXCURSION. A POEM.
In one volume, price _6s[._?] cloth.
V.
SELECT PIECES FROM WORDSWORTH. In
one volume, illustrated by numerous Woodcuts, price 7_s._ 6_d._
boards. 8_s._ 6_d._ half-bound, morocco, gilt edges.
CAMPBELL’S POEMS.
I.
CAMPBELL’S POETICAL WORKS. A NEW
EDITION. In one volume, illustrated by 20 Vignettes from
designs by TURNER, and 37 Woodcuts from designs by HARVEY.
Price 20_s._ boards.
II.
CAMPBELL’S POETICAL WORKS. In one
pocket volume, illustrated by numerous Woodcuts, price 8_s._
cloth.
III.
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF CAMPBELL.
Edited by Dr. WILLIAM BEATTIE, one of his Executors.
_In the Press._
SHELLEY’S WORKS.
I.
SHELLEY’S POETICAL WORKS. Edited by
MRS. SHELLEY. In one volume, 8vo, with Portrait and Vignette,
price 10_s._ 6_d._ cloth.
II.
SHELLEY’S ESSAYS AND LETTERS FROM
ABROAD. Edited by MRS. SHELLEY. A NEW EDITION.
Price 5_s._
CHARLES LAMB’S WORKS.
I.
LAMB’S WORKS. A NEW EDITION. In one
volume, 8vo, with Portrait and Vignette, price 14_s._ cloth.
II.
THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. A NEW EDITION.
Price 5_s._
D’ISRAELI’S WORKS.
I.
CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. THIRTEENTH EDITION. In one volume, 8vo,
with Portrait, Vignette, and Index, price 16_s._ cloth.
II.
MISCELLANIES OF LITERATURE. In one volume, 8vo, with Vignette,
price 14_s._ cloth.
CONTENTS:--
1. LITERARY MISCELLANIES.
2. QUARRELS OF AUTHORS.
3. CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS.
4. THE LITERARY CHARACTER.
5. CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST.
DYCE’S BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
THE WORKS OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER; the Text formed from a new
collation of the early Editions. With Notes and a biographical
Memoir. By the Rev. A. DYCE. In eleven volumes 8vo. Price 6_l._
12_s._ 0_d._ cloth.
CHAUCER AND SPENSER.
I.
CHAUCER’S POETICAL WORKS. With an ESSAY on his LANGUAGE AND
VERSIFICATION, and an INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSE; together with NOTES
and a GLOSSARY. By THOMAS TYRWHITT. In one volume, 8vo with
Portrait and Vignette, price 16_s._ cloth.
II.
SPENSER’S WORKS. With a MEMOIR, NOTES, and a GLOSSARY. In one
volume, 8vo. _In the Press._
MISCELLANEOUS.
I.
HAYDN’S DICTIONARY OF DATES, and UNIVERSAL REFERENCE, relating to
all Ages and Nations; comprehending every Remarkable Occurrence,
Ancient and Modern--the Foundation, Laws, and Governments of
Countries--their Progress in Civilisation, Industry, and
Science--their Achievements in Arms; the Political and Social
Transactions of the British Empire--its Civil, Military, and
Religious Institutions--the Origin and Advance of Human Arts and
Inventions, with copious details of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
The whole comprehending a body of information, Classical,
Political, and Domestic, from the earliest accounts to the present
time. SECOND EDITION. In one volume, 8vo, price 18_s._ cloth.
II.
KNOWLES’S (JAMES) PRONOUNCING AND EXPLANATORY DICTIONARY OF THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Founded on a correct development of the Nature,
the Number, and the Various Properties of all its Simple and
Compound Sounds, as combined into Syllables and Words. A NEW
EDITION. In medium 8vo, price 10_s._ 6_d._ cloth.
III.
By the AUTHOR OF “TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST.”
DANA’S SEAMAN’S MANUAL; containing a Treatise on Practical
Seamanship, with Plates; a Dictionary of Sea Terms; Customs and
Usages of the Merchant Service; Laws relating to the Practical
Duties of Master and Mariners. SECOND EDITION. Price 5_s._ cloth.
IV.
HINTS ON HORSEMANSHIP, to a NEPHEW and NIECE; or, Common Sense and
Common Errors in Common Riding. By Colonel GEORGE GREENWOOD, late
of the Second Life Guards; Price 2_s._ 6_d._
V.
CICERO’S LIFE AND LETTERS. The Life by Dr. MIDDLETON; The Letters
translated by WM. MELMOTH and Dr. HEBERDEN. In one volume, 8vo,
with Portrait and Vignette, price 16_s._ cloth.
VI.
ELLEN MIDDLETON. A TALE. BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON. SECOND
EDITION. In three volumes price 31_s._ 6_d._ cloth.
VII.
CAPTAIN BASIL HALL’S FRAGMENTS OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. A NEW
EDITION. In one volume, 8vo, price 12_s._ cloth.
VIII.
DEERBROOK. A NOVEL. By HARRIET MARTINEAU. A NEW EDITION. In one
pocket volume, price 6_s._ cloth.
IX.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. A Historical Romance. By HARRIET MARTINEAU. A
NEW EDITION. In one pocket volume, price 6_s._ cloth.
X.
TALFOURD’S (MR. SERJEANT) VACATION RAMBLES AND THOUGHTS; comprising
the Recollections of three Continental Tours in the Vacations of
1841, 42, and 43. SECOND EDITION. Price 10_s._ 6_d._ cloth.
XI.
DYCE’S REMARKS ON MR. C. KNIGHT’S AND MR. J. P. COLLIER’S EDITIONS OF
SHAKSPEARE. In 8vo, price 9_s._ cloth.
XII.
LIFE IN THE SICK-ROOM: ESSAYS. By AN INVALID. SECOND EDITION. Price
8_s._ boards.
XIII.
HISTOIRE DE FRANCE DU PETIT LOUIS. Par LADY CALLCOTT. Price 2_s._
6_d._ half-bound.
XIV.
SHELLEY’S (MRS.) RAMBLES IN GERMANY AND ITALY in 1840, 1842, and
1843. In 2 vols. post 8vo. Price 21_s._ cloth.
POETRY.
TENNYSON’S POEMS. 2 vols. Price 12_s._ boards.
MILNES’S POEMS. 4 vols. Price 20_s._ boards.
TRENCH’S JUSTIN MARTYR, and other Poems. 6_s._ bds.
-------- POEMS FROM EASTERN SOURCES. Price 6_s._ bds.
STERLING’S POEMS. Price 6_s._ boards.
---------- STRAFFORD. Price 5_s._ boards.
BROWNING’S PARACELSUS. Price 6_s._ boards.
---------- SORDELLO. Price 6_s._ 6_d._ boards.
PATMORE’S (COVENTRY) POEMS. Price 5_s._ bds.
BARRETT’S (MISS) POEMS. 2 vols. Price 12_s._ bds.
(In 24mo.)
TALFOURD’S (SERJEANT) TRAGEDIES. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
TAYLOR’S PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
-------- EDWIN THE FAIR, &c. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
BARRY CORNWALL’S SONGS. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
LEIGH HUNT’S POETICAL WORKS. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
PERCY’S RELIQUES. 3 vols. Price 7_s._ 6_d._
LAMB’S DRAMATIC SPECIMENS. 2 vols. Price 5_s._
CHEAP EDITIONS OF POPULAR WORKS
SHELLEY’S ESSAYS AND LETTERS. Price 5_s._
SEDGWICK’S LETTERS FROM ABROAD. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
DANA’S TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST. 2_s._ 6_d._
CLEVELAND’S VOYAGES AND COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISES. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
ELLIS’S EMBASSY TO CHINA. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
PRINGLE’S RESIDENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA. 3_s._ 6_d._
THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Price 5_s._
HUNT’S INDICATOR, AND COMPANION. Price 5_s._
------ THE SEER; OR, COMMON-PLACES REFRESHED. Price 5_s._
SHERIDAN’S DRAMATIC WORKS. With an INTRODUCTION. By LEIGH HUNT.
Price 5_s._
LAMB’S LIFE AND LETTERS. Price 5_s._
------ ROSAMUND GRAY, &c. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
------ TALES FROM SHAKSPEARE. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
------ ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. TO WHICH IS ADDED, MRS. LEICESTER’S
SCHOOL. Price 2_s._
HALL’S VOYAGE TO LOO-CHOO. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
------ TRAVELS IN SOUTH AMERICA. Price 5_s._
------FRAGMENTS OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD
SERIES. Price 5_s._ each.
CAMPBELL’S POETICAL WORKS. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
LAMB’S POETICAL WORKS. Price 1_s._ 6_d._
BAILLIE’S (JOANNA) FUGITIVE VERSES. Price 1_s._
SHAKSPEARE’S POEMS. Price 1_s._
Bradbury & Evans, Printers, Whitefriars.
ESSAYS.
“Quand on se porte bien, on ne comprend pas comment on pourrait
faire si on était malade; et quand on l’est, on prend médecine
gaiement: le mal y résout. On n’a plus les passions et les désirs
des divertissements et des promenades, que la santé donnait, et qui
sont incompatibles avec les nécessités de la maladie. La nature
donne alors des passions et des désirs conformes à l’état présent.
Ce ne sont que les craintes que nous nous donnons nous-mêmes, et
non pas la nature, qui nous troublent; parcequ’elles joignent à
l’état où nous sommes les passions de l’état où nous ne sommes
pas.”--PASCAL.
LIFE IN THE SICK-ROOM.
ESSAYS.
BY
AN INVALID.
“For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.”--SHAKSPERE.
“The saddest birds a season find to sing.”--ROBERT SOUTHWELL.
SECOND EDITION.
LONDON:
EDWARD MOXON, DOVER-STREET.
MDCCCXLIV.
LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
TO ---- vii
THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT IN THE SICK-ROOM 1
SYMPATHY TO THE INVALID 11
NATURE TO THE INVALID 43
LIFE TO THE INVALID 64
DEATH TO THE INVALID 104
TEMPER 126
BECOMING INJURED 146
POWER OF IDEAS IN THE SICK-ROOM 155
SOME PERILS AND PAINS OF INVALIDISM 176
SOME GAINS AND SWEETS OF INVALIDISM 197
TO----
“Passion I see is catching; for mine eyes,
Seeing those beads of sorrow stand in thine,
Began to water.”
SHAKSPERE.
“When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes;
Who alone suffers suffers most i’ the mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind.
But then the mind much sufferance doth o’erskip,
When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.”
SHAKSPERE.
As I write this, I cannot but wonder when and how you will read it, and
whether it will cause a single throb at the idea that it may be meant
for you. You have been in my mind during the passage of almost
all the thoughts that will be found in this book. But for your
sympathy--confidently reckoned on, though never asked--I do not know
that I should have had courage to mark their procession, and record
their order. I have felt that if I spoke of these things at all, it must
be to some fellow-sufferer--to some one who had attained these
experiences before me or with me; and, having you for my companion
throughout, (however unconsciously to yourself), I have uttered many
things that I could hardly otherwise have spoken: for one may speak far
more freely with a friend, though in the hearing of others, than when
singly addressing a number. Most frequently, however, I have forgotten
that others could hear, and have conversed as with you alone.
It matters little, in this view, that we have never met--that each of us
does not know, except by the eye of the mind, with what outward face the
other has encountered the unusual lot appointed to both. While I was as
busy as any one on the sunny plain of life, I heard of you laid aside in
the shadowy recess where our sunshine of hope and joy could never
penetrate to you; and it was with reverence, and not pity, that I
inquired of those who could tell whether you had separate lights of
heaven, such as there are for retreats like yours. When I was myself
withdrawn into such a recess, if I learned to pity more than before, it
was with a still enhanced reverence for your older experience. As the
evils of protracted unhealthiness came upon me, one after another, I
knew that they had all visited you long ago; and I felt as if they
brought me a greeting from you. For me, at least, you have not suffered
in vain. Would there might be anything in this volume which might enable
you to say the same to me!
At all events, there is something sweet and consoling in the fellowship.
Though we would, if we could, endure anything to set the other
free--though we would thankfully take upon us any suffering that nature
could bear for the thought that no one else was qualified to conceive of
our troubles,--yet, as this cannot be, we may make the most of the
comfort of our companionship. In our wakeful night seasons, when the
healthy and the happy are asleep, we may call to each other from our
retreats, to know each how the other fares; and, whether we are at the
moment dreary or at peace, it may be that there are angels abroad,
(perhaps the messengers of our own sympathies), who may bear our mutual
greetings, and drop them on their rounds. Often has this been my fancy,
when the images close about me have been terrific enough; and when, in
the very throng of these horrors, I have cast about for some charm or
talisman wherewith to rid myself of them, and some voice of prayer has
presently reached me from a temple on the furthest horizon of my
life--or some sweet or triumphant hymn of submission or praise has
floated to my spirit’s ear from the far shores of my childhood--I have
hoped, in the midst of the heaven thus brought down about me, that the
same consolations were visiting you, who in the same need would, I knew,
make the same appeal.
But there are times when the sense of fellowship is dearer still. You
know, doubtless, as well as I, the emptiness of the consolation when
our pitying friends, in all love and sincerity, remind us of what we did
by our efforts when we were well and active, and what we are doing still
for the world, by preserving a decent quietness in the midst of our
troubles. You know, as well as I, how withering would be the sense of
our own nothingness, if we tried to take comfort from our own dignity
and usefulness. You know, as well as I, how very far we can see from our
place on the verge of life, over its expanse, and how ridiculous, if it
were not shocking, would be any complacency on the ground of our having
followed the instincts of our nature to work, while work was
possible,--the issues of such divinely-appointed instrumentality being
wholly brought out and directed by Him who framed and actuated us. You
know, as I do, how useful it is to human beings to have before their
eyes spectacles of all experiences; and we are alike willing, having
worked while we could, now to suffer as we may, to help our kind in
another mode. We feel it some little service to be appointed to,--having
become accustomed to our footing on the shaking plank over the deep dark
river,--to lead on and uphold with a steady hand some who may be
appointed to follow, and perhaps to pass us upon it.
But while agreeing in this, our happiest fellowship must be, I think, in
seeing, with a clearness we could never otherwise have attained, the
vastness and certainty of the progression with which we have so little
to do. I do not believe it is possible for persons in health and action
to trace, as we can, the agencies for good that are going on in life and
the world. Or, if they can, it seems as if the perception were
accompanied by a breathless fear,--a dread of being, if not crushed,
whirled away somewhere, hurried along to new regions for which they are
unprepared, and to which, however good, they would prefer the familiar.
You and I, and our fellow-sufferers, see differently, whether or not we
see further. We know and feel, to the very centre of our souls, that
there is no hurry, no crushing, no devastation attending Divine
processes. While we see the whole system of human life rising and rising
into a higher region and a purer light, we perceive that every atom is
as much cared for as the whole. While we use our new insight to show us
how things are done,--and gravely smile to see that it is by every man’s
overrating the issues of his immediate pursuit, in order that he may
devote all his energies to it, (without which nothing would ever be
done,) we smile with another feeling presently, on perceiving how an
industry and care from above are compensating to every man his mistake
by giving him collateral benefits when he misses the direct good he
sought,--by giving him and his helpers a wealth of ideas, as often as
their schemes turn out, in their professed objects, profitless. When we
see men straining every nerve to reach the tempting apples which are to
prove dust and ashes in their jaws, we see also, by virtue of our
position, the flying messenger who is descending with the ambrosia which
is to feed their immortal part. We can tell that while revolutions are
grandly operating, by which life and the world will in time change their
aspect,--while a progress is advancing to which it is now scarcely
conceivable that we should ever have dreamed of putting our
hands,--there is not one of our passing thoughts that is not
ordained,--not a sigh of weariness unheeded,--not an effort of patience
that is not met half-way by divine pity,--not a generous emotion of
triumph in the world’s improvement that is not hallowed by the divine
sympathy ever living and breathing round about us. This our peculiar
privilege, of seeing and feeling something of the simultaneous vastness
and minuteness of providential administration, is one in which we most
enjoy sympathy;--at least, I do:--and in this, therefore, do I find your
undoubted fellowship most precious.
Here then I end my greeting,--except in as far as the whole book is
truly conversation with you. I shall not direct it to your hands, but
trust to the most infallible force in the universe,--human sympathy,--to
bring these words under your eye. If they should have the virtue to
summon thoughts which may, for a single hour, soften your couch, shame
and banish your foes of depression and pain, and set your chamber in
holy order and something of cheerful adornment, I may have the honour of
being your nurse, though I am myself laid low,--though hundreds of miles
are between us, and though we can never know one another’s face or
voice.
Yours,
----
ESSAYS.
THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT IN THE SICK-ROOM.
“Lasting! what’s lasting?
The earth that swims so well, must drown in fire,
And Time be last to perish at the stake.
The heavens must parch; the universe must smoulder.
Nothing but thoughts can live, and such thoughts only
As god-like are, making God’s recreation.”
I. KNOWE.
“Affliction worketh patience: and patience, experience; and
experience, hope.” ST. PAUL.
“All places that the eye of Heaven visits
Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.”
SHAKSPERE.
The sick-room becomes the scene of intense convictions; and among these,
none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the
permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil. At times I
could almost believe that long sickness or other trouble is ordained to
prove to us this very point--a point worth any costliness of proof.
The truth may pass across the mind of one who has suffered briefly--may
occur to him when glancing back over his experience of a short sharp
illness or adversity. He may say to himself that his temporary suffering
brought him lasting good, in revealing to him the sympathy of his
friends, and the close connexion of human happiness with things unseen;
but this occasional recognition of the truth is a very different thing
from the abiding and unspeakably vivid conviction of it, which arises
out of a condition of protracted suffering. It may look like a paradox
to say that a condition of permanent pain is that which, above all,
proves to one the transient nature of pain; but this is what I do
affirm, and can testify.
The apparent contradiction lies in the words “permanent pain”--that
condition being made up of a series of pains, each of which is
annihilated as it departs; whereas all real good has an existence beyond
the moment, and is indeed indestructible.
A day’s illness may teach something of this to a thoughtful mind; but
the most inconsiderate can scarcely fail to learn the lesson, when the
proof is drawn out over a succession of months and seasons. With me, it
has now included several New Year’s Days; and what have they taught me?
What any future New Year’s retrospect cannot possibly contradict, and
must confirm: though it can scarcely illustrate further what is already
as clear as its moon and stars.
During the year looked back upon, all the days, and most hours of the
day, have had their portion of pain--usually mild--now and then, for a
few marked hours of a few marked weeks, severe and engrossing; while,
perhaps, some dozen evenings, and half-dozen mornings, are remembered as
being times of almost entire ease. So much for the body. The mind,
meantime, though clear and active, has been so far affected by the
bodily state as to lose all its gaiety, and, by disuse, almost to forget
its sense of enjoyment. During the year, perhaps, there may have been
two surprises of light-heartedness, for four hours in June, and two
hours and a half in October, with a few single flashes of joy in the
intermediate seasons, on the occurrence of some rousing idea, or the
revival of some ancient association. Over all the rest has brooded a
thick heavy cloud of care, apparently causeless, but not for that the
less real. This is the sum of the pains of the year, in relation to
illness. Where are these pains now?--Not only gone, but annihilated.
They are destroyed so utterly, that even memory can lay no hold upon
them. The fact of their occurrence is all that even memory can preserve.
The sensations themselves cannot be retained, nor recalled, nor revived;
they are the most absolutely evanescent, the most essentially and
completely destructible of all things. Sensations are unimaginable to
those who are most familiar with them. Their concomitants may be
remembered, and so vividly conceived of, as to excite emotions at a
future time: but the sensations themselves cannot be conceived of when
absent. This pain, which I feel now as I write, I have felt innumerable
times before; yet, accustomed as I am to entertain and manage it, the
sensation itself is new every time; and a few hours hence I shall be as
unable to represent it to myself as to the healthiest person in the
house. Thus are all the pains of the year annihilated. What remains?
All the good remains.
And how is this? whence this wide difference between the good and the
evil?
Because the good is indissolubly connected with ideas--with the unseen
realities which are indestructible. This is true, even of those
pleasures of sense which of themselves would be as evanescent as bodily
pains. The flowers sent to me by kind neighbours have not
perished,--that is, the idea and pleasure of them remain, though every
blossom was withered months ago. The game and fruit, eaten in their
season, remain as comforts and luxuries, preserved in the love that sent
them. Every letter and conversation abides,--every new idea is mine for
ever; all the knowledge, all the experience of the year, is so much
gain. Even the courses of the planets, and the changes of the moon, and
the hay-making and harvest, are so much immortal wealth--as real a
possession as all the pain of the year was a passing apparition. Yes,
even the quick bursts of sunshine are still mine. For one instance,
which will well illustrate what I mean, let us look back so far as the
Spring, and take one particular night of severe pain, which made all
rest impossible. A short intermission, which enabled me to send my
servant to rest, having ended in pain, I was unwilling to give further
disturbance, and wandered, from mere misery, from my bed and my dim
room, which seemed full of pain, to the next apartment, where some
glimmer through the thick window-curtain showed that there was light
abroad. Light indeed! as I found on looking forth. The sun, resting on
the edge of the sea, was hidden from me by the walls of the old priory:
but a flood of rays poured through the windows of the ruin, and gushed
over the waters, strewing them with diamonds, and then across the green
down before my windows, gilding its furrows, and then lighting up the
yellow sands on the opposite shore of the harbour, while the
market-garden below was glittering with dew and busy with early bees and
butterflies. Besides these bees and butterflies, nothing seemed
stirring, except the earliest riser of the neighbourhood, to whom the
garden belongs. At the moment, she was passing down to feed her pigs,
and let out her cows; and her easy pace, arms a-kimbo, and complacent
survey of her early greens, presented me with a picture of ease so
opposite to my own state, as to impress me ineffaceably. I was suffering
too much to enjoy this picture at the moment: but how was it at the end
of the year? The pains of all those hours were annihilated--as
completely vanished as if they had never been; while the momentary peep
behind the window-curtain made me possessor of this radiant picture for
evermore. This is an illustration of the universal fact. That brief
instant of good has swallowed up long weary hours of pain. An
inexperienced observer might, at the moment, have thought the conditions
of my gain heavy enough; but the conditions being not only discharged,
but annihilated long ago, and the treasure remaining for ever, would not
my best friend congratulate me on that sunrise? Suppose it shining on,
now and for ever, in the souls of a hundred other invalids or mourners,
who may have marked it in the same manner, and who shall estimate its
glory and its good!
It is clear that the conviction I speak of arises from the
supposition--indispensable and, I believe, almost universal,--that pain
is the chastisement of a Father; or, at least, that it is, in some way
or other, ordained for, or instrumental to good. The experience of men
leaves this belief uncontested, and incontestable. Otherwise, evil and
pain would be, in their effects on sufferers, long-lived, if not as
immortal as good. If we believed our sufferings to be inflicted by
cruelty or malice, our pains would immediately take a permanent
existence by becoming connected with our passions of fear, revenge, &c;
though still--as is known to students of the human soul,--the evil,
however long sustained, must be finally absorbed in the good. We, of our
age and state of society, however, have to do with none who believe pain
to be inflicted by the malignity of a superior being. Those who are not
so happy as to recognise in it a mere disguise of blessings otherwise
unattainable, receive it, under some of the various theories of
necessary imperfection, as something unavoidable, and therefore to be
received placidly, if not gratefully. These would admit, as cheerfully
as the adorers of a chastening Father, the richness of my wealth, as I
lie, on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by the treasures of the departing
year,--the kindly Year which has utterly destroyed for me so much that
is terrible and grievous, while he leaves with me all the new knowledge
and power, all the teachings from on high, and the love from far and
near, and even the frailest-seeming blossom of pleasure that, in any
moment, he has cast into my lap.
Thus has a succession of these friendly years now visited me and gone:
and, as far as we can see, thus will every future one repeat the
lesson. If any person disputes, no one can disprove, the result, wrought
out, as it is, by natural experience. It is no contradiction, that some
are soured by suffering. Their pains, like mine, are gone; and with
them, as with others, it is ideas which remain; and ideas are
essentially good, a part of the indestructible inner life which must,
from its very nature, sooner or later part with its evil, through
experience of the superabounding good of the universe. If one so soured
by pain dies in this mood, the ideal part of him is that which remains
to be carried into a fresh scene, where the mood cannot be fed by the
experience which nourished it here. If he lives long enough to change
his mood, there is every probability that the benignant influences which
are perpetually at work throughout life and nature will dissolve and
disperse his troubles, as the eastern lights, the breath of morning and
the chirp of birds, steal in upon the senses of the troubled sleeper,
and thence possessing themselves of his reason, convince him that the
miseries of the night season were but a dream.
True and consoling as it may be for him, and for those about him, to
find thus that “trouble may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the
morning,” they have not fully learned the lessons of the sick-room if
they are not aware that, while the troubles of that night season are
thus sure to pass away, its product of thoughts and experiences must
endure, till the stars which looked down upon the scene have dissolved
in their courses. The constellations formed in the human soul, out of
the chaos of pain, must have a duration compared with which, those of
the firmament are but as the sparkles showered over the sea by the
rising sun. To one still in this chaos,--if he do but see the creative
process advancing,--it can be no reasonable matter of complaint, that
his course is laid the while through such a region; and he will feel
almost ashamed of even the most passing anxiety as to how soon he may be
permitted to emerge.
SYMPATHY TO THE INVALID.
“The essence of friendship is entireness; a total magnanimity and
trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its
object as a god, that it may deify both.”
EMERSON.
“Our hands in one, we win not shrink
From life’s severest due:--
Our hands in one, we win not blink
The terrible and true.”
MILNES.
If all sorrow teaches us that nothing is more universal than sympathy,
long and irremediable sickness proves plainly, that nothing is more
various than its kinds and degrees; or, it may be, than the
manifestations of the sympathetic grief which is shared by all. In a
sharp sickness of a few days or weeks, all good and kind people act and
speak much alike; are busy and ingenious in hastening the recovery, and
providing relief meantime. It is when death is not to be looked for, nor
yet health, that the test is applied; that, on either hand, the genius
and the awkwardness of consolation present themselves, with a vast
gradation between these extremes. It is easy and pleasant to be grateful
for all, and to appreciate the love and pity which inspire them; but it
is impossible to relish all equally, or to give the same admiration to
that which flows forth fully and freely, and that sympathy which is
suppressed, restricted, or in any way changed before it reaches its
object.
O! what a heavenly solace to the soul is free sympathy in its hour of
need! There is but one that can vie with it; and that one is, in truth,
an enhancement of the same emotions. Communion with
“Mercy, carried infinite degrees
Beyond the tenderness of human hearts,”
is, indeed, the supreme, incommunicable delight which must be only
referred to, because no sense of it can be conveyed by language; but,
because it is of kindred nature, though separated by immeasurable
distance, the solace of human sympathy ranks next to this. What a
springing of the heart, like that on the discovery of a new truth, or
entrance on a new enterprise in youth, attends the revelation to a
sufferer of some stroke of genius in the consolations of one of the many
who grieve for his affliction!
Many give their best thoughts to provide alleviations--whether in the
form of medicines, or dainties for the mind or palate, for the eye or
ear; and sweet is the enjoyment of the kindness which provides, whether
the luxuries themselves can be relished or not. Some kind soul does a
better service still, by affording opportunity for the sufferer to
minister to other afflicted ones; to relieve some distress of poverty,
or other want. This is sweet; but there are times when the personal
trial needs some solace nearer and more direct than this. Then is the
hour when the pain of sympathy in the hearts of friends impels them to
cast about for relief, and tempts them to speak of hope to the sufferer
who has no hope, or none compatible with the kind of consolation they
attempt. Going back to the days when I, myself, was the sympathiser, I
remember how strong is the temptation to imagine, and to assure the sick
one, that his pain will not last; that the time will come when he will
be well again; that he is already better; or, if it be impossible to say
that, that he will get used to his affliction, and find it more
endurable. How was it that I did not see that such offers of consolation
must be purely irritating to one who was not feeling better, nor
believing that he should ever be better, nor in a state to be cheered by
any speculation as to whether his pain would, or would not become more
endurable with time! Exactly in proportion to the zeal with which such
considerations were pressed, must have been the sufferer’s clearness of
perception of the disguised selfishness which dictated the topics and
the words. I was (as I half suspected at the time, from my sense of
restraint and uneasiness,) trying to console myself, and not my friend;
indulging my own cowardice, my own shrinking from a painful truth, at
the expense of the feelings of the sufferer for whom my heart was
aching. I, who had no genius for consolation, at least in cases of
illness, have been silently corrected by the benignest of reproofs,--by
the experience of this genius in my own season of infirmity.
The manifestations of sympathetic feeling are as various as of other
feelings; but the differences are marked by those whom they concern,
with a keenness proportioned to the hunger of their heart. The sick man
has even sometimes to assure himself of the grief of his friends, by
their silence to him on circumstances which he cannot but feel most
important. Their letters, extending over months and years, perhaps
contain no mention of his trial, no reference to his condition, not a
line which will show to his executors that the years over which they
spread were years of illness. Though he can account for this suppression
in the very love of his friends, yet it brings no particular consolation
to him. Others, perhaps, administer praise;--praise, which is the last
thing a humbled sufferer can appropriate;--praise of his patience or
fortitude, which perhaps arrives at the moment when his resolution has
wholly given way, and tears may be streaming from his eyes, and
exclamations of anguish bursting from his lips. Such consolations
require forbearance, however it may be mingled with gratitude. Far
different was my emotion, when one said to me, with a face like the face
of an angel, “Why should we be bent upon your being better, and make up
a bright prospect for you? I see no brightness in it; and the time seems
past for expecting you ever to be well.” How my spirits rose in a moment
at this recognition of the truth!
And again--when I was weakly dwelling on a consideration which troubled
me much for some time, that many of my friends gave me credit for far
severer pain than I was enduring, and that I thus felt myself a sort of
impostor, encroaching unwarrantably on their sympathies, “O! never
mind!” was the reply. “That may be more than balanced hereafter. You
will suffer more, with time--or you will seem to yourself to suffer
more; and then you will have less sympathy. We grow tired of despairing,
and think less and less of such cases, whether reasonably or not; and
you may have less sympathy when you need it more. Meantime, you are not
answerable for what your friends feel; and it is good for them--natural
and right--whether you think it accurate or not.”
These words put a new heart into me, dismissed my scruples about the
over-wealth of the present hour, and strengthened my soul for future
need--the hour of which has not, however, yet arrived. It is a
comfortable season, if it may but last, when one’s friends have ceased
to hope unreasonably, and not “grown tired of despairing.”
Another friend, endowed both by nature and experience with the power I
speak of, gave me strength for months--for my whole probation--by a
brave utterance of one word, “Yes.” In answer to a hoping consoler, I
told a truth of fact which sounded dismal, though because it was fact I
spoke it in no dismal mood; and the genius at my side, by a
confirmatory “Yes,” opened to my view a whole world of aid in prospect
from a soul so penetrating and so true.
I know it is pleaded that there are sufferers not strong enough to bear
the truth--who like to be soothed with hopes, well or ill-grounded; who
find immediate comfort in being told that they will throw off their pain
and be at ease. If there be such, I have never known them; and I doubt
their existence. I believe that the tendency to make the worst of bodily
complaints, on which so many satires (some just) are founded, is much
aggravated, if not generally caused, by the tendency in the healthy and
happy to disallow pain and a sad prospect. Children, weak and
unpractised sufferers as they are, are found not to be consolable in the
manner proposed. We all know the story of the little boy in the street,
crying from the smart of a fall, who, when assured by a good-natured
passenger that he should not cry, because he would be well to-morrow,
answered, “Then I won’t cry to-morrow.”
The weakest sufferers are precisely those who are least able to
appropriate the future and its good things. If this be true of the
weak, and if the strong find it irritating to be medicined with soft
fictions, or presented with anything but sound truth, the popular method
of consolation appears to be excluded altogether. If my own life were to
be lived over again, I should, from the strength of this conviction,
convert most of its words of intended consolation into a far more
consolatory condolence. Never again should the suffering spirit turn
from me, as I fear it has often done--if too gentle to be irritated--yet
sickening at hollow words of promise, when instant fellow-feeling was
what was needed; and mournfully thinking, though too kind to say it,
“‘the heart knoweth its own bitterness,’ and mine must endure alone.”
The fair retribution has not followed, for never thus have I been left
to feel.
I am here reminded of a sort of consolation, often offered, which I do
not at all understand. I do not quarrel with it, however, for it may
suit others less insensible to its claims. Sequestered sufferers, whose
term of activity is over, and who apparently have only to endure as they
may, and learn and enjoy what they can, till they receive their summons
to enter on a new career, are referred for solace to their
consciences--to their consciousness of services rendered to society, and
duty done in active days. I strongly doubt whether Conscience was ever
appointed to the function of Consoler. I more than doubt; I disbelieve
it. According to my own experience, the utmost enjoyment that conscience
is capable of is a negative state, that of ease. Its power of suffering
is strong; and its natural and best condition I take to be one of simple
ease; but for enjoyment and consolation, I believe we must look to other
powers and susceptibilities of our nature.
It is inconceivable to me that our moral sense can ever be gratified by
anything in our own moral state. It must be more offended by our own
sins and weaknesses than by all the other sin and weakness in the world,
in proportion as the evil is more profoundly known to it, and more
nakedly disgusting, because it is stripped of the allowances and
palliations which are admissible in all other cases. And this disgust is
not compensated for by a corresponding satisfaction in our own good; for
the very best good we can ever recognise in ourselves falls so far short
of our own conceptions, so fails to satisfy the requisitions of the
moral sense, that it can afford no gratification. A conscience which
can enjoy itself on its own resources, must be of a very low degree--I
should say of a spurious nature. In the highest state of health that I
can conceive of--health spiritual and physical--I believe the function
of the moral sense to be to delight itself in good wherever it is to be
found, (and no wise person will look for it within himself,) to keep
watch and ward against evil, and to cherish lowliness at home by its
incessant consciousness of the imperfection there; an imperfection so
keenly felt by an enlightened and accurate conscience, as to cause a
wholesome going abroad for interests and gratifications, so that ease
may be found in self-forgetfulness. The necessity which so many feel of
a relief from their disappointed conscience--of adventitious merits on
which to rely in the failure of their own--of a saving interposition
between their own imperfections and the requisitions of God and duty;
this prevalent need is an unanswerable rebuke to the presumption which
talks of “the happiness of an approving conscience.” If it is thus in
the season of vigour, health, and self-command, how inexpressibly absurd
is the mistake of bringing such a topic as consolation to the sick and
sequestered!--to the sick, whose whole heart is faint, and the mental
frame disordered, more or less, in proportion as the body is jaded and
the nerves unstrung; and to the sequestered, who perforce devour their
own hearts, and find them the bitterest food! Why, one of the most
painful trials of long sickness and seclusion is, that all old pains,
all past moral sufferings, are renewed and magnified; that in sleepless
nights, and especially on waking in the morning, every old sin and
folly, and even the most trifling error, rises up anew, however long ago
repented of and forgiven, and, in the activity of ordinary life,
forgotten. Any sort of ghost is more easily laid than this kind. Though
their “brains were out” long years ago, they continue to come--they
present themselves in defiance of all--even the most sacred, exorcisms;
so that it becomes one of the duties of the sick to bear their presence
with composure, and cease to struggle for their exclusion. In the midst
of this experience, to have one’s friends come, and desire one to look
back upon one’s past life for complacency and self-gratulation, in order
to assure one’s self how well one has used one’s powers and
opportunities--how much one has done for society--how lofty and
honourable a life one has led--and so forth,--O! what words can express
the absurdity! If the consoler could but see the invisible array which
comes thronging into the sick-room from the deep regions of the past,
brought by every sound of nature without, by every movement of the
spirit within; the pale lips of dead friends whispering one’s hard or
careless words, spoken in childhood or youth--the upbraiding gaze of
duties slighted and opportunities neglected--the horrible apparition of
old selfishness and pusillanimities--the disgusting foolery of idiotic
vanities; if the consoler could catch a momentary glimpse of this
phantasmagoria of the sick-room, he would turn with fear and loathing
from the past, and shudder, while the inured invalid smiles, at such a
choice of topics for solace.
Then it might become the turn of the invalid to console--to explain how
these are but phantoms--how solace does abound, though it comes from
every region rather than the kingdom of conscience--and how, while the
past is dry and dreary enough, there are streams descending from the
heaven-bright mountain-tops of the future, forever flowing down to our
retreat, pure enough for the most fastidious longing, abundant enough
for the thirstiest soul. The consoler may then learn for life how easily
all personal complacencies may be dispensed with, while the sufferer can
tell of a true “refuge and strength,” and “present help,” and of this
“river that gladdens the city of God,” and flows to meet us as we
journey towards it.
But, the anxious consoler may say, Is it right so to banish these
complacencies? If you really have served the world, however imperfectly
in your own eyes--if you have sown thoughts in minds, and called forth
affections in hearts--ought you to deny the facts, or that they are
good?
By no means. If you assure me of these things as facts, you bring me
good news. But I should feel it as good news--perhaps better--if the
service had been rendered by anybody else; for the simple reason that
the good would then be to me unmixed, which now it is not, nor can ever
be. Call upon me, whenever you will, to rejoice that men have gained an
idea--that the aged or children have been amused or strengthened--or
that society has been relieved from an abuse, by anyone’s means. Rouse
me from the depression of pain, wake me up from sleep for the better
refreshment of this news, and I will rejoice; but do not think to
enhance your tidings by telling me that these things are my doing. The
only effect of that is, to remind me how much better the service might
have been done. Surely we both believe that all truth and goodness are
destined to arise sooner or later among men. To be visited with new or
good ideas is a blessing: to be appointed to communicate them is an
honour: but these blessings and honours are a ground for personal
humility, not complacency. It is to me impossible to connect the idea of
merit with any such destiny. There is nothing we have so little hand in
as our own ideas; there is no occupation less voluntary than that of
uttering them. And so will every servant of his race say of his own
species of service. He will rejoice that something new and good is
acquired or attained by his race; and he must naturally be thankful for
the honour and enjoyment appointed to him as the medium: but he can find
no ground for personal complacency in the matter. He will be utterly
careless whether men know, a hundred years hence, through whom they
received the benefit, or whether his name has been for ninety years
lost to all but his intimate friends. If he were offered the choice
between this reputation and the fact of his having conquered one unkind
emotion, or made one single effort of endurance, he would eagerly prefer
the secret genuine good to the blazoned apparent one.
“There is something extremely absurd and ridiculous,” says the holy
Hartley, “in supposing a person to be perpetually feasting his own mind
with, and dwelling upon, the praises that already are, or which he hopes
will hereafter be, given to him. And yet, unless a man does this (which
besides would evidently incapacitate him for deserving or obtaining
praise), how can he fill up a thousandth part of his time with the
pleasures of ambition?” Even more absurd is to me the image of a lonely
sufferer, trying not only to fill up his time, but to soothe his pains
of body, and calm his anguish of spirit, by drawing delight from the
remembrance of his own little contrivings and doings in the world. I
would recommend, in preference, the project of drawing sunbeams from
cucumbers, as a solace on the rack.
If it is asked, after all this, “who can console? how is it possible to
please and soothe the sufferer?” I answer, that nothing is
easier--nothing is more common--nothing more natural to simple-minded
people. Never creature had more title than I to speak confidently of
this, from experience which melts my heart day by day. “Speaking the
truth in love,” is the way. One who does this cannot but be an angel of
consolation. Everything but truth becomes loathed in a sick-room. The
restless can repose on nothing but this: the sharpened intellectual
appetite can be satisfied with nothing less substantial; the susceptible
spiritual taste can be gratified with nothing less genuine, noble, and
fair.
Then the question arises, what sort of truth? Why, that which is
appropriate to the one who administers. To each a separate gift may be
appointed. Only let all avoid every shadow of falsehood. Let the nurse
avow that the medicine is nauseous. Let the physician declare that the
treatment will be painful. Let sister, or brother, or friend, tell me
that I must never look to be well. When the time approaches that I am to
die, let me be told that I am to die, and when. If I encroach
thoughtlessly on the time or strength of those about me, let me be
reminded; if selfishly, let me be remonstrated with. Thus to speak the
truth in love is in the power of all. Higher service is a talent in the
hands of those who have a genius for sympathy--a genius less rare, thank
God! than other kinds.
The archangel of consolation is the friend who, at a fitting moment,
reminds me of my high calling. Not the clergyman, making his stated
visit for the purpose; not the zealous watcher for souls, who fears for
mine on the ground of difference of doctrine; not the meddler, who takes
charge of my spiritual relations whether I will or no: none such are, by
virtue of these offices, effectual consolers. But if the friend of my
brighter days--with whom I have travelled, sung, danced, consulted about
my work, enjoyed books and society--the friend, now far off, busy in
robust health of body and spirit, sends me a missive which says, “You
languish--you are sick at heart. But put this sickness from your heart,
and your pains under your feet. You have known before that there is a
divine joy in endurance. Prove it now. Lift up your head amidst your
lot, and wait the issue--not submissively, but heroically. Live out your
season, not wistfully looking out for hope, or shrinking from fear: but
serenely and immoveably (because in full understanding with God),
ENDURE;” if such an appeal comes, and at any hour (for there is no hour
of sickness with which it is not congenial), what an influx of life does
it bring! What a heavenly day, week, year, succeeds! How the crippled
spirit leaps up at the miraculous touch, and springs on its way,
praising God in his very temple! And again, when a thoughtful,
conscientious spirit, guided by an analytical intellect, utters from a
distance, not as an appeal, but as in soliloquy--“With an eternity
before us, it cannot matter much, if we would but consider it, whether
we are laid aside for such or such a length of time; whether we can be
busy for others at this moment, or must wait so many months or years:
and as for ourselves, how can we tell but that we shall find the
experience we are gaining worth any cost of suffering?” When such a
thought comes under my eye, as if I overheard some spirit in the
night-wind communing with itself, I feel a strong and kindly hand take
my heart and steep it in patience. Again, a kind visitor, eloquent by
using few words or none on matters nearest at heart, takes down from my
shelves a Fenelon or other quietist, and with silent finger points to
the saying, inexhaustible in truth, that it is what we _are_ that
matters--not what we _do_; and here, in one moment, do I find a
boundless career opened to me within the four walls of my room. Again--a
tender spirit, anxious under responsibility, says “If you could but
fully feel, as you will one day feel, the privilege of having your life
and lot settled for you--your spirit free, your mind at leisure--no
hurry, no conflicts nor misgivings about duty--you would easily conceive
that there are some who would gladly exchange with you, and pour into
your lap willingly all the good things that you seem to be without. I
dare say we are very philosophical for you about your sufferings; but
where I do sympathise with you, is in regard to this clearness and
settledness of your life’s duty and affairs.” To this again, my whole
being cries “amen!” Here are a few of the heavenly messages which have
come to me through human hearts. When below these are ranged the
innumerable ministrations of help, of smiles and tears, of solid
comforts and beguiling luxuries, it does indeed seem impossible that I
should be in any degree dubious or hard to please in the contemplation
and reception of human sympathy. What I have said of its most perfect
forms, I have said from my own knowledge.
* * * * *
Under this head of sympathy occurs the important practical
consideration, what should be the arrangements of a permanent invalid,
in regard to companionship?
In most cases, this is no matter of choice, but a point settled by
domestic circumstances; where it is not, however, I cannot but wish that
more consideration was given to the comfort of being alone in illness.
This is so far from being understood, that, though the cases are
numerous of sufferers who prefer, and earnestly endeavour to procure
solitude, they are, if not resisted, wondered at, and humoured for a
supposed peculiarity, rather than seen to be reasonable; whereas, if
they are listened to as the best judges of their own comforts, it may be
found that they have reason on their side.
In a house full of relations, it may be unnatural for an invalid to pass
many hours alone; but where, as is the case with numbers who belong to
the middle and working classes of society, all the other members of the
family have occupations and duties--regular business in life--without
the charge of the invalid, it does appear to me, and is felt by me
through experience, to be incomparably the happiest plan for the sick
one to live alone. By experience it is found to be not only expedient,
but important in regard to happiness. In pictures of the sick-room,
drawn by those who are at ease and happy, the group is always of the
sufferer supported and soothed by some loving hand and tender voice, and
every pain shared by sympathy. This may be an approach to truth in the
case of short sharp illness, where the sufferer is taken by surprise,
and has his whole lesson to learn; but a very different account would
often be given by an invalid whose burden is for life, and who has
learned the truths of the condition. We, of that class, find it best and
happiest to admit our friends only in our easiest hours, when we can
enjoy their society, and feel ourselves least of a burden; and it is
indispensable to our peace of mind to be alone when in pain. Where
welfare of body is out of the question, peace of mind becomes an object
of supreme importance; and this is unattainable when we see any whom we
love suffering, in our sufferings, even more than we do: or when we
know that we have been the means of turning any one’s day of ease and
pleasure into sorrow. The experience of years qualifies me to speak
about this; and I declare that I know of no comfort, at the end of a day
of suffering, comparable to that of feeling that, however it may have
been with one’s self, no one else has suffered,--that one’s own fogs
have dimmed nobody’s sunshine: and when this grows to be the nightly
comfort of weeks, months, and years, it becomes the most valuable
element in the peace of the sufferer, and lightens his whole lot. If not
in the midst of pain, he feels in prospect of it, and after it, that it
really matters very little whether and how much he suffers, if nobody
else is pained by it. It becomes a habit, from the recurrence of this
feeling, to write letters in one’s best mood; to give an account of
one’s self in one’s best hours; to present one’s most cheerful aspect
abroad, and keep one’s miseries close at home, under lock and key.
The objection commonly brought to this system is, that it is injurious
to one’s loving and anxious friends. But I do not find it so. So loving
and anxious are my friends, that they do not need the wretched stimulus
of seeing me suffer. All that can be done for me is done; and it would
be no consolation, but a great aggravation to me, that they should
suffer gratuitously. Their general love, and care and concern for me,
are fully satisfying to me; and I know that I have only to call and they
will come. But I feel with inexpressible comfort what a difference there
is between their general concern for my state, and the pain of days, now
separately spent by them in ease and joy, which would be more dreary to
them than to me, if I let them share my dreariness. A trifling incident,
which occurred the other day, gave me strong satisfaction, as proving
that where my method can be made a system, it works well,--promoting the
cheerfulness, without impairing the sympathies, of even the youngest of
those for whom I have a welcome only at certain seasons. Two little
friends were with me--one greatly admiring various luxuries about me,
and thence proceeding to reckon up a large amount of privileges and
enjoyments in my possession and prospect, when his companion said, with
a sigh and tenderness of tone, musical to my soul, “Ah! but then, there
is the unhealthiness! that spoils everything!” To which the other
mournfully assented. What more could these children know by having their
hearts wounded by the spectacle of suffering! And if they may be spared
the pain, larger minds and more ripened hearts must require it even
less.
I need not say that this plan of solitude in pain supposes sufficient
and kindly attendance; but, for a permanence, (though I know it to be
otherwise in short illnesses,) there is no attendance to be compared
with that of a servant. In as far as the help is mechanical, it tends to
habituate the sufferer to his lot, and the relation is sustained with
the least expenditure of painful feeling on both sides,--with the least
anxiety, as well as pain of sympathy.
There is sufficient kindliness excited in the attendant by the appeal to
her feelings, while there is no call for the agony which a congenial
friend must sustain; and, on the other side, there is no overwhelming
sense of obligation to the nurse, but a satisfactory consciousness of,
at least, partial requital. It is no small item in the account of this
method, that the promotion of the happiness of the attendant is a
cheerful, natural, and salutary pursuit to the invalid; a daily duty
imposed when so many others are withdrawn; a fragment of beneficent
power left in the scene of its wreck. To dignify her by putting one’s
self under express and frequent obligations to her,--to rejoice her by
enjoying relief or pleasure devised by her ingenuity,--to spare her
health, promote her little fortunes, encourage her best tastes and
aspirations, and draw out for her, as well as for one’s self, the
lessons of the sick-room; to study these things befits the mutual
relation, and cheers the life of the sufferer, while the connexion is
not so close as to involve the severer pains of sympathy.
In a sick-room, where health is never again to enter, it is well and
easily understood that commemorative seasons, anniversaries, &c., are
far from being, as elsewhere, among the gayest. In truth, they are often
mournful enough; but I am confident that they are most cheerily spent
alone. No heart leal to its kind can bear to let them pass unnoticed. It
is an intolerable selfishness to abolish them, as far as in one lies,
because they have ceased to gladden us; this would be as paltry as to
turn one’s back on an old companion, formerly all merriment and smiles,
because he comes to us in mourning or in tears; or, let us say,
abstracted and thoughtful. But it does not succeed to make small
attempts to keep the day, for the sake of one or two companions, putting
up Christmas holly over the fire-place, where there is only one to sit,
and having Christmas fare brought to the couch, to be sent away again.
But when one is alone, the matter is very different, and becomes far
gayer. There is nothing, then, to prevent my being in the world again
for the day; no human presence to chain me to my prison. When my servant
is dismissed to make merry with the rest, and I am alone with my holly
sprigs and the memories of old years, I can flit at will among the
family groups that I see gathered round many fire-sides. If the morning
is sunny, I actually see, with my telescope, the gay crowds that throng
the opposite shore after church; and the sight revives the dimmed image
of crowded streets, and brings back to my ear the almost forgotten sound
of “the church-going bell.” When it grows dark, and my lamp burns so
steadily as to give of itself a deep impression of stillness; when there
is no sound but of the cinder dropping on the hearth, or of the turning
of the leaf as I read or write, there is something of a holiday feeling
in pausing to view and listen to what is going on in all the houses
where one has an interest. By means of that inimitable telescope we
carry about in us, (which acts as well in the pitch-dark night as at
noon, and defies distance and house-walls,) I see in turn a Christmas
tree, with its tapers glittering in a room full of young eyes, or the
games and the dance, or the cozy little party of elderly folk round the
fire or the tea-table; and I hear, not the actual jokes, but the
laughter, and “the sough of words without the sense,” and can catch at
least the soul of the merriment. If I am at ease, I am verily among
them: if not, I am thankful not to be there; and, at all events have,
from life-long association, caught so much of the contagious spirit of
sociability, that, when midnight comes, I lie down with an impression of
its having been an extraordinary day,--a social one, though, (as these
are the days when one is sure _not_ to see one’s doctor,) the face of my
maid is, in reality, the only one that has met my eyes. O yes! on these
marked days, however it may be on ordinary ones, our friends may take
our word for it that we are most cheery alone.
There is one day of the year of which everybody will believe
this,--one’s birthday. Regarded as a birthday usually and naturally is,
in ordinary circumstances, there must be something melancholy in it when
attempted to be kept in the sick-room of a permanent invalid: but this
melancholy is lost when one is alone. It is true, one’s mind goes back
to the festivals of the day in one’s childhood, and to the mantling
feelings of one’s youth, when each birthday brought us a step further
into the world which lay in its gay charms all before us; and we find
the gray hairs and thin hands of to-day form an ugly contrast with the
images conjured up. But, in another view,--a view which can be enjoyed
only in silence and alone,--what a sanctity belongs to these gray hairs
and other tokens of decay! They and the day are each tokens (how dear!)
seals (how distinct!) of promise of our selection for a not distant
admittance to a station whence we may review life and the world to
better advantage than even now. If, with every year of contemplation,
the world appears a more astonishing fact, and life a more noble
mystery, we cannot but be reanimated by the recurrence of every birthday
which draws us up higher into the region of contemplation, and nearer
to the gate within which lies the disclosure of all mysteries which
worthily occupy us now, and doubtless a new series of others adapted to
our then ennobled powers. This is a birthday experience which it
requires leisure and solitude fully to appropriate: and it yet leaves
liberty for the human sympathies which belong to the season. Post time
is looked to for its sure freight of love and pity and good wishes from
a few--or not a few--whose affections keep them even more on the watch
than ourselves for one’s own holy day. Letters are one’s best company on
that day,--and best if they are one’s only company.
There is one point on which I can speak only as every one may,--from
observation and thought,--but on which I have a very decided impression,
notwithstanding;--as to the conduct which would be dictated by the
truest sympathy in a case which not unfrequently occurs. I have known
instances of persons, most benevolent and thoughtless of themselves
through life, becoming _exigeans_ and oppressive in their last days,
merely through want of information as to what they are doing. One
attendant is usually preferred to all others by a dying person: and I
have seen the favourite nurse worn out by the incessant service
required day and night by the sufferer, in ignorance how time
passes,--even in mistake of the night for the day. I have known the most
devoted and benevolent of women call up her young nurse from a snatch of
sleep at two in the morning to read aloud, when she had been reading
aloud for six or seven hours of the preceding day. I have known a
kind-hearted and self-denying man require of two or three members of his
family to sit and talk and be merry in his chamber, two or three hours
after midnight:--and both for want of a mere intimation that it was
night, and time for the nurse’s rest. How it makes one shudder to think
of this being one’s own case! The passing doubt whether one can trust
one’s friends, when the season comes, to save one from such tyrannical
mistakes, is a doubt sickening to the heart. Nothing is clearer _now_,
when we are in full possession of ourselves, than that the most
sympathising friend is one who cherishes our amiability and
reasonableness to the last,--who preserves our perfect understanding
with those about us through all dimness of the eyes and wandering of the
brain. If I could not trust my friends to save me from involuntary
encroachment at the last, I had rather scoop myself a hole in the sand
of the desert, and die alone, than be tended by the gentlest hands, and
soothed by the most loving voices in the choicest chamber.
It is doubtless easiest to comply at the moment of such exactions, at
any sacrifice of subsequent health and nerve: but it should be
remembered that the sacrifice is not of health alone. The posthumous
love must suffer;--or if not the love, the respect for the departed. It
is impossible to love one who appears in a selfish aspect,--though it be
the merest mask, most briefly worn,--so well as the countenance that
never concealed its benevolence for a moment. Let then the timely
thought of the future,--a provident care for the memory of the dying
friend, suggest the easy prudence which may obviate encroachment. Let
the bewildered sufferer be frequently and cheerfully told the hour,--and
informed that such an one is going to rest, to be replaced by another
for so many hours. A little forethought and resource may generally
prevent the great evil I speak of: and if not, true sympathy requires
that there should be a cheerful word of remonstrance--or let us call it
rectification. So may it be with me, if so lingering a departure be
appointed! Thus would every one say beforehand; and it seems to me a sin
against every one’s moral rights not to take him at his word.
NATURE TO THE INVALID.
“O mighty love! Man is one world and hath
Another to attend him!”
GEORGE HERBERT.
“Let us find room for this great guest in our small houses.”
_Emerson._
“Shut not so soon! The dull-eyed night
Has not as yet begun
To make a seizure of the light,
Or to seal up the sun.”
HERRICK.
When an invalid is under sentence of disease for life, it becomes a duty
of first-rate importance to select a proper place of abode. This is
often overlooked; and a sick prisoner goes on to live where he lived
before, for no other reason than because he lived there before. Many a
sufferer languishes amidst street noises, or passes year after year in a
room whose windows command dead walls, or paved courts, or some such
objects; so that he sees nothing of Nature but such sky and stars as
show themselves above the chimney-tops. I remember the heart-ache it
gave me to see a youth, confined to a recumbent posture for two or three
years, lying in a room whence he could see nothing, and dependent
therefore on the cage of birds by his bed-side, and the flowers his
friends sent him, for the only notices of Nature that reached him,
except the summer’s heat and winter’s cold. There was no sufficient
reason why he should not have been placed where he could overlook
fields, or even the sea.
If a healthy man, entering upon a temporary imprisonment, hangs his
walls with a paper covered with roses, and every one sympathises in this
forethought for his mind’s health, much more should the invalid, (who,
though he must be a prisoner, has yet liberty of choice where his prison
shall be,) provide for sustaining and improving his attachment to
Nature, and for beguiling his sufferings, by the unequalled refreshments
she affords. He will be wise to sacrifice indolence, habit, money and
convenience, at the outset, to place himself where he can command the
widest or the most beautiful view that can be had without sacrificing
advantages more essential still. There are few things more essential
still: but there are some;--such as medical attendance, and a command of
the ordinary conveniences of life.
What is the best kind of view for a sick prisoner’s windows to command?
I have chosen the sea, and am satisfied with my choice. We should have
the widest expanse of sky, for night scenery. We should have a wide
expanse of land or water, for the sake of a sense of liberty, yet more
than for variety; and also because then the inestimable help of a
telescope may be called in. Think of the difference to us between seeing
from our sofas the width of a street, even if it be Sackville-street,
Dublin, or Portland Place, in London, and thirty miles of sea view, with
its long boundary of rocks, and the power of sweeping our glance over
half a county, by means of a telescope! But the chief ground of
preference of the sea is less its space than its motion, and the
perpetual shifting of objects caused by it. There can be nothing in
inland scenery which can give the sense of life and motion and connexion
with the world like sea changes. The motion of a waterfall is too
continuous,--too little varied,--as the breaking of the waves would be,
if that were all the sea could afford. The fitful action of a
windmill,--the waving of trees, the ever-changing aspects of mountains
are good and beautiful: but there is something more life-like in the
going forth and return of ships, in the passage of fleets, and in the
never-ending variety of a fishery.
But then, there must not be too much sea. The strongest eyes and nerves
could not support the glare and oppressive vastness of an unrelieved
expanse of waters. I was aware of this in time, and fixed myself where
the view of the sea was inferior to what I should have preferred, if I
had come to the coast for a summer visit. Between my window and the sea
is a green down, as green as any field in Ireland; and on the nearer
half of this down, haymaking goes forward in its season. It slopes down
to a hollow, where the Prior of old preserved his fish, there being
sluices formerly at either end, the one opening upon the river, and the
other upon the little haven below the Priory, whose ruins still crown
the rock. From the Prior’s fish-pond, the green down slopes upwards
again to a ridge; and on the slope are cows grazing all summer, and half
way into the winter. Over the ridge, I survey the harbour and all its
traffic, the view extending from the light-houses far to the right, to a
horizon of sea to the left. Beyond the harbour lies another county,
with, first, its sandy beach, where there are frequent wrecks--too
interesting to an invalid,--and a fine stretch of rocky shore to the
left; and above the rocks, a spreading heath, where I watch troops of
boys flying their kites; lovers and friends taking their breezy walk on
Sundays; the sportsman with his gun and dog; and the washerwomen
converging from the farm-houses on Saturday evenings, to carry their
loads, in company, to the village on the yet further height. I see them,
now talking in a cluster, as they walk each with her white burden on her
head, and now in file, as they pass through the narrow lane; and finally
they part off on the village green, each to some neighbouring house of
the gentry. Behind the village and the heath, stretches the rail-road;
and I watch the train triumphantly careering along the level road, and
puffing forth its steam above hedges and groups of trees, and then
labouring and panting up the ascent, till it is lost between two
heights, which at last bound my view. But on these heights are more
objects; a windmill, now in motion and now at rest; a lime-kiln, in a
picturesque rocky field; an ancient church tower, barely visible in the
morning, but conspicuous when the setting sun shines upon it; a
colliery, with its lofty wagonway, and the self-moving wagons running
hither and thither, as if in pure wilfulness; and three or four farms,
at various degrees of ascent, whose yards, paddocks, and dairies I am
better acquainted with than their inhabitants would believe possible. I
know every stack of the one on the heights. Against the sky I see the
stacking of corn and hay in the season, and can detect the slicing away
of the provender, with an accurate eye, at the distance of several
miles. I can follow the sociable farmer in his summer-evening ride,
pricking on in the lanes where he is alone, in order to have more time
for the unconscionable gossip at the gate of the next farm-house, and
for the second talk over the paddock-fence of the next, or for the third
or fourth before the porch, or over the wall, when the resident farmer
comes out, pipe in mouth, and puffs away amidst his chat, till the wife
appears, with a shawl over her cap, to see what can detain him so long;
and the daughter follows, with her gown turned over head (for it is now
chill evening), and at last the sociable horseman finds he must be
going, looks at his watch, and, with a gesture of surprise, turns his
steed down a steep broken way to the beach, and canters home over the
sands, left hard and wet by the ebbing tide, the white horse making his
progress visible to me through the dusk. Then, if the question arises
which has most of the gossip spirit, he or I, there is no shame in the
answer. Any such small amusement is better than harmless--is
salutary--which carries the spirit of the sick prisoner abroad into the
open air, and among country people. When I shut down my window, I feel
that my mind has had an airing.
But there are many times when these distant views cannot be sought; when
we are too languid for any objects that do not present themselves near
at hand. Here, too, I am provided. I overlook gardens, and particularly
a well-managed market-garden, from which I have learned, and enjoyed,
not a little. From the radish-sowing in early spring, to the latest
turnip and onion cropping, I watch the growth of everything, and hence
feel an interest in the frosts and rain, which I should otherwise not
dream of. A shower is worth much to me when the wide potato-beds, all
dry and withering in the morning, are green and fresh in the evening
light; and the mistress of the garden, bringing up her pails of frothing
milk from the cow-house, looks about her with complacency, and comes
forth with fresh alacrity to cut the young lettuces which are sent for,
for somebody’s supper of cold lamb.
The usual drawback of a sea-side residence is the deficiency of trees. I
see none (except through the telescope) but one shabby sycamore, which
grows between my eye and the chimney of the baths in the haven. But this
is not a pure disadvantage. I may see less beauty in summer, but I also
see less dreariness in winter.
The winter beauty of the coast is a great consideration. The snow does
not lie; at least rarely for more than a very few hours; and then it has
no time to lose its lustre. When I look forth in the morning, the whole
land may be sheeted with glittering snow, while the myrtle-green sea
swells and tumbles, forming an almost incredible contrast to the summer
aspect of both, and even to the afternoon aspect; for before sunset the
snow is gone, except in the hollows; all is green again on shore, and
the waves are lilac, crested with white. My winter pleasures of this
kind were, at first, a pure surprise to me. I had spent every winter of
my life in a town; and here, how different it is! The sun shines into
my room from my hour of rising till within a few minutes of dusk, and
this, almost by settled custom, till February, our worst month. The
sheeny sea, swelling in orange light, is crossed by fishing-boats, which
look black by contrast, and there is none of the deadness of winter in
the landscape; no leafless trees, no locking up with ice; and the air
comes in through my open upper sash brisk, but sun-warmed. The robins
twitter and hop in my flower-boxes, outside the window; and the
sea-birds sit on the water, or cluster on the spits of sand left by the
tide. Within-doors, all is gay and bright with flowering narcissus,
tulips, crocus, and hyacinths. And at night, what a heaven! What an
expanse of stars above, appearing more steadfast, the more the Northern
Lights dart and quiver! And what a silvery sheet of moonlight below,
crossed by vessels more black than those which looked blackest in the
golden sea of the morning! It makes one’s very frame shiver with a
delicious surprise to look, (and the more, the oftener one looks,) at a
moonlit sea through the telescope; at least, it is so with one who can
never get near the object in any other way. I doubt whether there be any
inland spectacle so singular and stirring, except that which is common
to both, a good telescopic view of the planets. This transcends all. It
is well to see by day, the shadows of walkers on the wet sands; the
shadows of the sails of a windmill on the sward; the shadow of rocks in
a deep sea cave; but far beyond this is it to see the shadow of the disk
of Saturn on his rings. How is it that so many sick prisoners are
needlessly deprived of all these sights; shut up in a street of a town?
What is there there, that can compensate them for what they lose?
There is some set-off to the winter privileges I have spoken of, in an
occasional day of storms; perhaps two or three in each season. These are
very dreary while they last; though, considering the reaction, the next
fine day, salutary on the whole. On these days, the horror of the winds
is great. One’s very bed shakes under them; and some neighbour’s house
is pretty sure to be unroofed. The window-cushions must be removed,
because nothing can keep out the rain, not even the ugly array of cloths
laid over all the sashes. The rain and spray seem to ooze through the
very glass. The wet comes through to the ceiling, however perfect the
tiling. The splash and dash against the panes are wearing to the
nerves. Balls of foam drive, like little balloons, over the garden; and,
sooner or later in the day, we see the ominous rush of men and boys to
the rocks and the ridge, and we know that there is mischief. We see
either a vessel labouring over the bar, amidst an universal expectation
that she will strike; or we see, by a certain slope of the masts, that
she is actually on the rocks; or she drives wilfully over to the sands,
in spite of all the efforts of steam-tugs and her own crew; and then
come forth the life-boats, which we cannot help watching, but which look
as if they must themselves capsize, and increase the misery instead of
preventing it. Then, when the crew are taken from the rigging, and
carried up to the port, ensues the painful sight of the destruction of
the vessel; parties, or files of women, boys, and men, passing along the
ridge or the sands with the spoils; bundles of sailcloth, armsful of
spars, shoulder-loads of planks; while, in the midst, there is sure to
be a report, false or true, of a vessel having foundered, somewhere near
at hand. On such days, it is a relief to bar the shutters at length, and
close the curtains, and light the lamp, and, if the wind will allow, to
forget the history of the day. Still more thankful are we to go to
bed--I can hardly say to rest--for invalids are liable to a return in
the night of the painful impressions of noon, with exaggerations, unless
the agitation has been such as to wear them out with fatigue. But, as I
said, such days are very few. Two or three such in a year, and two or
three weeks of shifting sea-fog in spring, are nearly all the drawbacks
we have; nearly the only obscurations of Nature’s beauties.
How different are “the seasons, and their change,” to us, and to the
busy inhabitants of towns! How common is it for townspeople to observe,
that the shortest day is past without their remembering it was so near!
or the equinox, or even the longest day! Whereas, we sick watchers have,
as it were, a property in the changes of the seasons, and even of the
moon. It is a good we would not sell for any profit, to say to
ourselves, at the end of March, that the six months of longest days are
now before us; that we are entering upon a region of light evenings,
with their soft lulling beauties; and of short nights, when, late as we
go to rest, we can almost bid defiance to horrors, and the depressions
of darkness. There is a monthly spring of the spirits too, when the
young moon appears again, and we have the prospect of three weeks’
pleasure in her course, if the sky be propitious. I have often smiled in
detecting in myself this sense of property in such shows; in becoming
aware of a sort of resentment, of feeling of personal grievance, when
the sky is not propitious; when I have no benefit of the moon for
several nights together, through the malice of the clouds, or the
sea-haze in spring. But, now I have learned by observation where and
when to look for the rising moon, what a superb pleasure it is to lie
watching the sea-line, night after night, unwilling to shut the window,
to leave the window-couch, to let the lamp be lighted, till the punctual
and radiant blessing comes, answering to my hope, surpassing my
expectation, and appearing to greet me with express and consolatory
intent! Should I actually have quitted life without this set of
affections, if I had not been ill? I believe it. And, moreover, I
believe that my interest in these spectacles of Nature has created a new
regard to them in others. I see a looking out for the rising moon among
the neighbours, who have possessed the same horizon-line all their
lives, but did not know its value till they saw what it is to me. I
observe the children from the cottage swinging themselves up to obtain a
peep over the palings, when they see me on the watch in the window; and
an occasional peep at a planet, through my telescope, appears to dress
the heavens in quite a new light to such as venture to take a look.
They do not know, however, anything of my most thrilling experience of
these things--for it happens when they are all at rest. I keep late
hours, (for the sake of husbanding my seasons of ease;) and now and then
I have nerve enough to look abroad for my last vision of the day, an
hour after midnight, when the gibbous moon,--having forsaken the
sea,--slowly surmounts the priory ruins on the high rock, appearing in
the black-blue heaven like a quite different planet from that which I
have been watching,--and from that which I shall next greet, a slender
crescent in the light western sky, just after sunset. To go from this
spectacle to one’s bed is to recover for the hour one’s health of soul,
at least: and the remembrance of such a thrill is a cordial for future
sickly hours which strengthens by keeping.
I have a sense of property too in the larks which nestle in all the
furrows of the down. It is a disquietude to see them start up and soar,
with premature joy, on some mild January day, before our snows and
storms have begun, when I detect in myself a feeling of duty to the
careless creatures,--a longing to warn them, by my superior wisdom, that
they must not reckon yet on spring. And on April mornings, when the
shadows are strong in the hollows, and some neighbour’s child sends me
in a handful of primroses from the fields, I look forth, as for my due,
to see the warblers spring and fall, and to catch their carol above the
hum and rejoicing outcry of awakening Nature. If the yellow butterflies
do not come to my flower-box in the sunny noon, I feel myself wronged.
But they do come,--and so do the bees: and there are times when the
service is too importunate,--when the life and light are more than I can
bear, and I draw down the blind, and shut myself in with my weakness,
and with thoughts more abstract. But when, in former days, had simple,
natural influences such power over me? How is it that the long-suffering
sick, already deprived of so much, are ever needlessly debarred from
natural and renovating pleasures like these?
Watch the effect upon them of a picture, or a print of a breezy
tree,--of a gushing stream,--of a group of children swinging on a gate
in a lane. If they do not (because they cannot) express in words the
thirst of their souls for these images, observe how their eyes wistfully
follow the portfolio or volume of plates which ministers this scenery to
them. Observe how, in looking at portraits, their notice fastens at once
on any morsel of back-ground which presents any rural objects. Observe
the sad fondness with which they cherish flowers,--how reluctantly it is
admitted that they fade. Mark the value of presents of bulbs,--above the
most splendid array of plants in flower, which kind people love to send
to sick prisoners. Plants in bloom are beautiful and glorious; but the
pleasure to a prisoner is to see the process of growth. It is less the
bright and fragrant flower that the spirit longs for than the spectacle
of vegetation.
Blessings on the inventors and improvers of fern-houses! We feel towards
them a mingling of the gratitude due to physicians, and appropriate to
the Good People. We find under their glass-bells fairy gifts, and
prescriptions devised with consummate skill. In towns, let the sick
prisoner have a fern-house as a compensation for rural pleasures; and in
the country as an addition to them.
Blessings on the writers of voyages and travels; and not the less for
their not having contemplated our case in describing what they have
seen! A school-boy’s or a soldier’s eagerness after voyages and travels
is nothing to that of an invalid. We are insatiable in regard to this
kind of book. To us it is scenery, exercise, fresh air. The new
knowledge is quite a secondary consideration. We are weary of the aspect
of a chest of drawers,--tired of certain marks on the wall, and of many
unchangeable features of our apartment; so that when a morning comes,
and our eyes open on these objects, and we foresee the seasons of pain
or bodily distress, or mental depression, which we know must come round
as regularly as the hours, we loathe the prospect of our day. Things
clear up a little when we rise, and we think we ought to be writing a
letter to such-a-one, which has been on our conscience for some time.
While the paper and ink are being brought, we put out our hand for that
book,--arrived or laid in sight this morning. It is a Journal of
Travels to the Polar Sea, or over the Passes of the Alps,--or in the
Punjâb,--or in Central or South America. Here the leaves turn over
rapidly;--there we linger, and read one paragraph again and again,
dwelling fondly on some congregation of images, to be seen by our bodily
eyes no more:--on we go till stopped by the fluttering and
distress,--the familiar pain, or the leaden down-sinking of the spirits,
and wonder that our trying time has come so soon, before the letter is
written. It has not come soon;--it is only that some hours of our
penance have been beguiled,--that we have been let out of our prison for
a holiday, and are now brought back to our schooling. But the good does
not end here. We see everything with different eyes,--the chest of
drawers,--the walls,--the bookshelves, and the pattern of the rug. We
have been seeing the Northern Lights and icebergs: we have been watching
for avalanches, or for the sun-rise from Etna, or gazing over the
Pampas, or peering through the primeval forest; and fragments of these
visions freshen the very daylight to us.
Blessings, above all, on Christopher North! We cannot but wonder
whether he ever cast a thought upon such as we are when breasting the
breeze on the moors, or pressing up the mountain-side, or watching
beside the trout-stream; or summoning the fowls of heaven, and passing
them in review into his Aviary;--or, especially, whether he had any
thought of recreating us when he sent forth his “Recreations” within
reach of our hands. If he did not think of sick prisoners in issuing his
vital, breezy book, he has missed a pleasure worthy of a heart like his.
He pities the town-dwellers who might relish nature and will not: but
his pity for them must be destitute of the zest which pity derives from
a consciousness of helpfulness. He can hardly help those to country
privileges who will not help themselves. But has he remembered the
chamber-dwellers,--the involuntary plodders within narrow bounds,--few
in comparison with the other class, it is true, but, if estimated by
emotion--by experience in which his heart can sympathise, not less
entitled to his regards?
Whether he thought of us or not, he has recreated us. Whether he is now
conscious of the fact or not, his spirit has come, many a time while his
tired body slept, and opened our prison-doors, and led us a long flight
over mountain and moor, lake and lea, and dropped us again on our beds,
refreshed and soothed, to dream at least of having felt the long-lost
sensation of health once more. Blessings on him then, as the kindest of
the friendly ghosts who use well their privilege of passing in and out
of all secret and sorrowful places, as they go to and fro on the earth!
If he has ministered to us with more or less deliberate intent, he needs
not to be told with what heartiness we drink his health in the first
full draught of the spring west wind--how cordially we pledge him in the
sparkling thunder-shower, or the brimming harvest-moon.
O! if every one who sorrows for us would help us to assert our claim to
Nature’s nursing, we should soon have our solace and our due. We have
not all the vigour and spirit,--nor even the inclination, in our morbid
state, to turn our faces to the fountain of solace--the fresh waters
which cool the spirit when fretted by its tormenting companion. We
cannot infallibly keep alive in our weak selves the love of Nature which
would lead us to repose ourselves upon her, and forget the evils which
even she cannot cure. But this should be done for us. When our sentence
is passed, clear and irreversible, the next thing is to make it as
lenient as possible in its operation; and especially by seeing that it
is through no oversight that, if the outward man must decay, the inward
man is not renewed day by day. This renewal, say some, must be by grace.
Well, Nature is God’s grace, meant to abound to all,--and not least to
those whom, by his chastening, he may be humbly supposed to love.
LIFE TO THE INVALID.
“There is a pause near death when men grow bold
Toward all things else.”
ROBERT LANDOR.
“Man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which
the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders: he
will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is
sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of
time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches,
but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is
base and frivolous in his own life, and be content with all places,
and any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in
the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath
already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.”
EMERSON.
Can we not all remember the time when, on first taking to heart Milton,
and afterwards Akenside,--(before knowing anything of Dante,) we
conceived the grandest moment of possible existence to be that of a
Seraph, poised on balanced wings, watching the bringing out of a world
from chaos, its completion in fitness, beauty and radiance, and its
first motion in its orbit, when sent forth by the creative hand on its
everlasting way? How many a young imagination has dwelt on this image
till the act appeared to be almost one of memory,--till the vision
became one of the persuasives to entertain the notion of human
pre-existence, in which we find one or another about us apt to delight!
To me, this conception was, in my childhood, one of eminent delight; and
when, years afterwards, I was involved in more than the ordinary toil
and hurry of existence, I now and then recurred to the old image, with a
sort of longing to exchange my function,--my share of the world-building
in which we all have to help, for the privilege of the supposed seraph.
Was there nothing prophetic, or at least provident, in this? Is not
sequestration from the action of life a different thing to me from what
it would have been if there had been no preparation of the imagination?
Though I, and my fellows in lot, must wait long for the seraphic powers
which would enable us fully to enjoy and use our position, we have the
position; and it is for us to see how far we can make our privilege
correspond to the anticipation.
Nothing is more impossible to represent in words, even to one’s self in
meditative moments, than what it is to lie on the verge of life and
watch, with nothing to do but to think, and learn from what we behold.
Let any one recall what it is to feel suddenly, by personal experience,
the full depth of meaning of some saying, always believed in, often
repeated with sincerity, but never till now _known_. Every one has felt
this, in regard to some one proverb, or divine scriptural clause, or
word of some right royal philosopher or poet. Let any one then try to
conceive of an extension of this realisation through all that has ever
been wisely said of man and human life, and he will be endeavouring to
imagine our experience. Engrossing, thrilling, overpowering as the
experience is, we have each to bear it alone; for each of us is
surrounded by the active and the busy, who have a different gift and a
different office;--and if not, it is one of those experiences which are
incommunicable. If we endeavour to utter our thoughts on the folly of
the pursuit of wealth, on the emptiness of ambition, on the surface
nature of distinctions of rank, &c. we are only saying what our hearers
have had by heart all their lives from books,--through a long range of
authors, from Solomon to Burns. Spoken moralities really reach only
those whom they immediately concern;--and they are such as are saying
the same things within their own hearts. We utter them under two
conditions:--sometimes because we cannot help it; and sometimes under a
sense of certainty that a human heart somewhere is needing the sympathy
for which we yearn.
You, my fellow-sufferer, now lying on your couch, the newspaper dropping
from your hand, while your eyes are fixed on the lamp, are you not
smiling at the thought that you have preserved, up to this time, more or
less of that faith of your childhood--that everything that is in print
is true? Before we had our present leisure for reflection, we read one
newspaper,--perhaps occasionally one on the other side. We found
opposition of views; but this was to be expected from diversities of
minds and position. Now the whole press is open to us, and we see what
is said on all sides. What an astonishing result! We hear that Cabinet
Ministers are apt to grow nervous about newspaper commentaries on their
conduct. To us this seems scarcely possible, seeing, as we do, that,
though every paper may be useful reading for the suggestions and other
lights it affords, every one is at fault, as a judge. Every one forgets,
actually or politicly, that it is in possession of only partial
information, generally speaking; we find no guarding intimation to the
reader, that there may be information behind which might alter the
aspect of the question. Such notice may be too much to expect of diurnal
literature; but the confusion made by the positiveness of all parties,
proceeding on their respective faulty grounds of fact--a positiveness
usually proportioned to the faultiness of the grounds--is such as might,
one would think, relieve Cabinet Ministers who have their work at heart,
from any very anxious solicitude about the judgments of the press, in
regard to unfinished affairs. Meantime, what a work is done! Amidst the
flat contradictions of fact, and oppositions of opinion,--amidst the
passion which sets men’s wits to work to conceive of and propose all
imaginable motives and results, what an abundance of light is struck
out! From a crowd of falsehoods, what a revelation we have of the truth,
which no one man, nor party of men, could reveal!--of the wants, wishes,
and ideas of every class or coterie of society that can speak for
itself, and of some that cannot!
Observe the process to which all this conduces. Before we were laid
aside, we read, as everybody read, philosophical histories, in which the
progress of society was presented; we read of the old times, when the
chieftain, whatever his title, dwelt in the castle on the steep, while
his retainers were housed in a cluster of dwellings under the shadow of
his protection. We read of the indispensable function of the Priest, in
the castle, and of the rise of his order; and then of the Lawyer and
_his_ order. We read of the origin of Commerce, beginning in monopoly;
and then of the gradual admission of more and more parties to the
privileges of trade, and their settling themselves in situations
favourable for the purpose, and apart from the head monopolists. We read
of the indispensable function of the Merchant, and the rise of _his_
order. We read of the feuds and wars of the aristocratic orders, which,
while fatally weakening them, left leisure for the middle and lower
classes to rise and grow, and strengthen themselves, till the forces of
society were shifted, and its destinies presented a new aspect. We read
of the sure, though sometimes intermitting, advance of popular
interests, and reduction of aristocratic power and privileges,
throughout the general field of civilisation. We read of all these
things, and assented to what seemed so very clear--so distinct an
interpretation of what had happened up to our own day. At the same
time, busy and involved as we were in the interests of the day, how
little use did we make of the philosophic retrospect, which might and
should have been prophetic! You, I think, dreaded in every popular
movement a whirlwind of destruction--in every popular success a sentence
of the dissolution of society. You believed that such a man, or such a
set of men, could give stability to our condition, and fix us, for an
unassignable time, at the point of the last settlement, or what you
assumed to be the latest. I, meanwhile, believed that our safety or
peril, for a term, depended on the event of this or that movement, the
carrying of this or that question. I was not guilty of fearing political
ruin. I did with constancy believe in the certain advance of popular
interests, and demolition of all injurious power held by the few; but I
believed that more depended on single questions than was really involved
in such, and that separate measures would be more comprehensive and
complete than a dispassionate observer thinks possible. In the midst of
all this, you and I were taken apart; and have not our eyes been opened
to perceive, in the action of society, the continuation of the history
we read so long ago? I need scarcely allude to the progress of popular
interests, and the unequalled rapidity with which some great questions
are approaching to a settlement. We have a stronger tendency to
speculate on the movements of the minds engaged in the transaction of
affairs, than on the rate of advance of the affairs themselves. With
much that is mortifying and sad, and something that is amusing, how much
is there instructive! And how clear, as in a bird’s-eye view of a
battle, or as in the analysis of a wise speculative philosopher, is the
process!
We see everybody that is busy doing what we did--overrating the
immediate object. There is no sin in this, and no harm, however it
proves incessantly the fallibility of human judgments. It is ordered by
Him who constituted our minds and our duties, that our business of the
hour should be magnified by the operation of our powers upon it. Without
this, nothing would ever be done; for every man’s energy is no more than
sufficient for his task; and there would be a fatal abatement of energy,
if a man saw his present employment in the proportion in which it must
afterwards appear to other affairs,--the limitation and weakness of our
powers causing us to apprehend feebly the details of what we see, when
we endeavour to be comprehensive in our views. The truth seems to lie in
a point of view different from either. I doubt whether it is possible
for us to overrate the positive importance of what we are doing, though
we are continually exaggerating its value in relation to other objects
of our own, while it seems pretty certain that we entertain an
inadequate estimate of interests that we have dismissed, to make room
for new ones.
Next, we see the present operation of old liberalising causes so strong
as to be irresistible; men of all parties--or, at least, reasonable men
of all parties--so carried along by the current of events, that it is
scarcely now a question with any one what is the point towards which the
vessel of the State is to be carried next, but how she is to be most
safely steered amidst the perils which beset an ordained course. One
party mourns that no great political hero rises up to retard the speed
to a rate of safety; and another party mourns that no great political
hero presents himself to increase while guiding our speed by the
inspiration of his genius; while there are a few tranquil observers who
believe that, glorious as would be the advent of a great political hero
at any time, we could never better get on without one, because never
before were principles so clearly and strongly compelling their own
adoption, and working out their own results. They are now the masters,
and not the servants, of Statesmen; and inestimable as would be the boon
of a great individual will, which should work in absolute congeniality
with these powers, we may trust, for our safety and progress, in their
dominion over all lesser wills.
Next, we perceive, (and we ask whether some others can be as blind to it
as they appear to be,) that a great change has taken place in the
morals--at least, in the conventional morals, of Statesmanship.
Consistency was once, and not long ago, a primary virtue in a
Statesman,--consistency, not only in general principle and aims, through
a whole public life, but in views of particular questions. Now it has
become far otherwise. The incurable bigots of political society are the
only living politicians, except a very small number of so-called
ultra-liberals, who can boast of unchanged views. Perhaps every public
man of sense and honour has changed his opinions, on more or fewer
questions, since he entered public life. It cannot be otherwise in a
period of transition, in a monarchy where the popular element is rising,
and the rulers are selected from the privileged classes alone. The
virtue of such functionaries now is, not that their opinions remain
stationary, and that their views remain consistent through a whole life,
but that they can live and learn.
And there are two ways of doing this--two kinds of men who do it. One
kind of man has all his life believed that certain popular principles
are for the good of society; he now learns to extend this faith to
measures which he once thought ultra and dangerous, and embraces these
measures with an earnest heart, for their own value. Another sort of man
has predilections opposed to these measures, laments their occurrence,
and wishes the old state of affairs could have been preserved; but he
sees that it is impossible,--he sees the strength of the national will,
and the tendency of events so united with these measures, that there is
peril in resistance. He thinks it a duty to make a timely proposal and
grant of them, rather than endanger the general allegiance and
tranquillity by delay, refusal, or conflict.
Now, though we may have our preferences in regard to such public men,
we cannot impute guilt to either kind. We see that it is unjust to
impute moral or political sin in either case. The great point of
interest to you and me is to observe how such new necessities and
methods work in society.
The incurables of the privileged classes of course act after their kind.
They are full of astonishment and feeble rage. The very small number of
really philosophical liberals--once ultras, but now nearly overtaken by
the times--- see tranquilly the fulfilment of their anticipations, and
anticipate still--how wisely, time will show. Of the two intermediate
parties, the question is, which appears most able to live and learn?
From the start the liberals had originally, it would seem that they must
hold the more dignified position of the two. But, judging them out of
their own mouths, what can we think and say?
To us it appears a noble thing to apprehend truth early, not merely as a
guess, but as a ground of opinion and action. A man who is capable of
this is secure that his opinions will be embraced by more and more
minds, till they become the universal belief of men. It is natural to
him to feel satisfaction as the fellowship spreads--both because
fellowship is pleasant to himself, and because the hour thereby draws
nearer and nearer for society to be fully blessed with the truth which
was early apparent to him. When this truth becomes indisputable and
generally diffused, and its related action takes place, his satisfaction
should be complete.
What an exception to this natural process, this healthy enjoyment, do we
witness in the political transactions of the time! Whatever may be
thought of the consistency of the most rapidly progressive party, what
can be said of the philosophy of the more early liberal? At every
advance of their former opponents, they are exasperated. They fight for
every tardily-apprehended political truth as for a private property.
They not only complain--“You thought the contrary in such a year!” “Here
are the words you spoke in such a year; the reverse of what you say
now!” but they cry, on every declaration of conversion to one of their
long-avowed opinions, “Hands off! that is _my_ truth; I got it so many
years ago, and you shan’t touch it!” To you and me (to whom it is much
the same thing to look back and to look abroad), it irresistibly occurs
to ask whether it was thus in former transition-states of society;
whether, for instance, assured and long-avowed Christians exclaimed, on
occasion of the conversion of enlightened heathens--“You extolled
Jupiter in such a year, and now you disparage him.” “Remember what you
said of Diana no longer ago than such a year!” “Do you think we shall
admit you to our Christ? He is ours these ten years!” Those of us who
believe and feel that the development of moral science (of which
political is one department) is as progressive as that of physical,
cannot but glance at the aspect of such conduct in relation to the
discovery of a new chemical agency, or important heavenly body; and
then.... But enough of such illustration. Nobody doubts the absurdity,
when fairly set down; though the number of grown men who have, within
three years, committed it daily in newspapers, clubs, markets, and the
Houses of Parliament, is so great as to be astonishing, till we discern
the causes, proximate and final, of such unphilosophical discourse and
demeanour.
While in this conflict grave and responsible leaders grow
factious--while men of purpose forget their march onward in
side-skirmishes--while reformers lose sight of the imperishable quality
of their cause, and talk of hopeless corruption and inevitable
destruction--how do affairs appear to us, in virtue merely of our being
out of the strife?
We see that large principles are more extensively agreed upon than ever
before--more manifest to all eyes, from the very absence of a hero to
work them, since they are every hour showing how irresistibly they are
making their own way. We see that the tale of the multitude is told as
it never was told before--their health, their minds and morals, pleaded
for in a tone perfectly new in the world. We see that the dreadful sins
and woes of society are the results of old causes, and that our
generation has the honour of being responsible for their relief, while
the disgrace of their existence belongs, certainly not to our time, and
perhaps to none. We see that no spot of earth ever before contained such
an amount of infallible resources as our own country at this day; so
much knowledge, so much sense, so much vigour, foresight, and
benevolence, or such an amount of external means. We see the progress of
amelioration, silent but sure, as the shepherd on the upland sees in the
valley the advance of a gush of sunshine from between two hills. He
observes what the people below are too busy to mark: how the light
attains now this object and now that--how it now embellishes yonder
copse, and now gilds that stream, and now glances upon the roofs of the
far-off hamlet--the signs and sounds of life quickening along its
course. When we remember that this is the same sun that guided the first
vessels of commerce over the sea--the same by whose light Magna Charta
was signed in Runnymede--that shone in the eyes of Cromwell after Naseby
fight--that rose on 800,000 free blacks in the West Indies on a certain
August morning--and is now shining down into the dreariest recesses of
the coal-mine, the prison, and the cellar--how can we doubt that
darkness is to be chased away, and God’s sunshine to vivify, at last,
the whole of our world?
Is it necessary, some may ask, to be sick, and apart, to see and believe
these things? Events seem to show that for some--for many--sequestration
from affairs is necessary to this end; for there are not a few who, in
the hubbub of party, have let go their faith, and have not to this
moment found it again. If there are some in the throng who can at once
act and anticipate faithfully, we may thank God for the blessing. But
they are sadly few.
I have said how clearly appears to us the fact and the reason of every
man’s exaggerating at the moment the importance of the work under his
hand. Not less clear is the ordination, as old and as continuous as
human action, by which men fail, more or less, of obtaining their
express objects, while all manner of unexpected good arises in a
collateral way. It is usual to speak of the results of the labours of
alchemists in this view, everybody seeing that while we still pick out
our gold from the ground, we owe much to the alchemists that they never
thought of. But the same is true of almost every object of human
pursuit, and even of belief. No doubt we invalids keep up our likeness
to our kind, in this respect, as far as we are able to act at all; but
we have more time than others to contemplate the working of the plan on
a large scale. Look at the projects, the discoveries, the quackeries of
the day!
With regard to the projects, however, I am at present disposed to make
one partial exception--to acknowledge, as far as I can at present see,
one case of singularity. I mean with regard to the New Postage. The
general rule proves true in one half of it, that many great and yet
unascertained benefits are arising, of which the projector did not
dream; so that a volume might be filled with anecdotes, curious to the
spectator and delightful to the benevolent. But, thus far, it does not
appear that any fallacy has mixed itself with the express expectations
of the projector. I do not speak of the failure of his efforts to get
his whole plan adopted. That will soon be a matter of small account--a
disappointment and vexation gone by--a temporary trial of patience,
forgotten except by the record. I mean that he has advanced no
propositions which he does not seem perfectly able to prove, uttered no
promises which do not appear certain to be fulfilled. This project is
perhaps the noblest afloat in our country and time, considering the
moral interests it involves. It is, perhaps, scarcely possible to
exaggerate the force and extent of its civilising and humanising
influences, especially in regard to its spreading the spirit of Home
over all the occupations and interests of life, in defiance of the
separating powers of distance and poverty; and it will be curious if
this enterprise, besides keeping the school-child at his mother’s bosom,
the apprentice, the governess, and the maid-servant, at their father’s
hearth--and us sick or aged people entertained daily with the flowers,
music, books, sentiment and news of the world we have left--should prove
an exception to all others in performing all its express promises. At
present, I own, this appears no matter of doubt.
As for the discoveries or quackeries of the time, (and who will
undertake to say in what instances they are not, sooner or later,
compounded?) how clear is the collateral good, whatever may be the
express failure? Those who receive all the sayings of the Coryphæus of
the phrenologists, and those who laugh at his maps of the mind and his
so-called ethics, must both admit that much knowledge of the structure
of the brain, much wise care of human health and faculties, has issued
from the pursuit, for the benefit of man. This Mesmerism again: who
believes that it could be revived, again and again, at intervals of
centuries, if there were not something in it? Who looks back upon the
mass of strange but authenticated historical narratives, which might be
explained by this agent, and looks, at the same time, into our dense
ignorance of the structure and functions of the nervous system, and will
dare to say that there is nothing in it? Whatever quackery and
imposture may be connected with it, however its pretensions may be
falsified, it seems impossible but that some new insight must be
obtained by its means, into the powers of our mysterious frame--some
fixing down under actual cognizance, of flying and floating notions,
full of awe, which have exercised the belief and courage of many wise,
for many centuries.
After smiling over old books all our lives, on meeting with quaint
assumptions of the Humoral pathology as true, while we supposed it
exploded--behold it arising again! One cannot open a newspaper, scarcely
a letter, without seeing something about the Water-cure; and grave
doctors, who will listen to nothing the laity can say of anything new,
(any more than they would tolerate the mention of the circulation of the
blood in Harvey’s day,) now intimate that the profession are disposed to
believe that there is more in the humoral pathology than was thought
thirty years ago, though not so much as the water-curers presume. Is it
not pretty certain, then, that something will come of this rage for the
water-cure, (something more than ablution, temperance, and exercise,)
though its professors must be embalmed as quacks in the literature of
the time? Is there not still another operation of the same principle
involved in the case? Are we not growing sensibly more merciful, more
wisely humane towards empirics themselves, when they cease to be our
oracles? Are we not learning, from their jumbled discoveries and
failures, that empiricism itself is a social function, indispensable,
made so by God, however ready we may be to bestow our cheap laughter
upon it? To us retired observers of life there is too much of this easy
mockery for our taste, or for the morals of society. Ours seems to be an
age when it is to the credit of others, besides statesmen, that they can
live and learn; and there is no getting on in our learning without
empiricism. It is less wise than easy to ridicule its connection with
non-essential modes and appearances prescribed or suggested by the
passions, needs, or follies of the time. It is most wise, and should be
easy, to have faith that the determining conditions of all experimental
discovery will be ascertained in due season. If, meanwhile, we can
obtain from the magnetisers any light as to any function of the nervous
system, we may excuse them from the performance of some promised feats.
If the Homœopathists can help us to any new principle of natural
antagonism to disease, they may well abide the laugh which I am not
aware that the serious of their number have ever provoked by any extreme
and unsupported pretensions.
* * * * *
But at this rate, occupying this scope, I shall never have done. I might
write on for every day of my life, and be no nearer the end of our
speculations. Let what I have said go for specimens of our observation
of life in two or three particulars. When I think of what I have seen
with my own eyes from one back window, in the few years of my illness;
of how indescribably clear to me are many truths of life from my
observation of the doings of the tenants of a single row of houses; it
seems to me scarcely necessary to see more than the smallest sample, in
order to analyse life in its entireness. I could fill a volume--and an
interesting one too--with a simple detail of what I have witnessed, as I
said, from one back-window. But I must tell, nothing. These two or three
little courts and gardens ought to be as sacred as any interior. Nothing
of the spy shall mix itself with my relation to neighbours who have
ever been kind to me. Suffice it, that if I saw no further into the
world with the mental than with the bodily eye, I should be kept in a
state of perpetual wonder, (of pleasing wonder, on the whole,) at the
operation of the human heart and mind, in its most ordinary
circumstances. Nothing can be more ordinary than the modes of life which
I overlook, yet am I kept wide awake in my watch by ever new instances
of the fulness of pleasure derivable from the scantiest sources; of the
vividness of emotion excitable by the most trifling incidents; of the
wonderful power pride has of pampering itself upon the most meagre food;
and, above all, of the infinite ingenuity of human love. Nothing,
perhaps, has impressed me so deeply as the clear view I have of almost
all, if not quite the whole, of the suffering I have witnessed being the
consequence of vice or ignorance. But when my heart has sickened at the
sight, and at the thought of so much gratuitous pain, it has grown
strong again in the reflection that, if unnecessary, this misery is
temporary,--that the true ground of mourning would be if the pain were
not from causes which are remediable. Then I cannot but look forward to
the time when the bad training of children,--the petulancies of
neighbours--the errors of the ménage--the irksome superstitions, and the
seductions of intemperance, shall all have been annihilated by the
spread of intelligence, while the mirth at the minutest jokes--the proud
plucking of nosegays--the little neighbourly gifts, (less amusing
hereafter, perhaps, in their taste)--the festal observances--the
disinterested and refined acts of self-sacrifice and love, will remain
as long as the human heart has mirth in it, or a humane complacency and
self-respect,--as long as its essence is what it has ever been, “but a
little lower than the angels.”
* * * * *
How is it possible to give an idea of what the gradual disclosure of the
fates of individuals is to us? In reading chronicles, and the lighter
kinds of history, we have all found ourselves eagerly watching the
course of love and domestic life, and pausing over the winding up, at
death, of the lot of personages whose mere names were all the interest
we began with. To us, in the monotony of our lives, it seems as if other
people’s lives slipped away with the rapidity with which we read a
book, while the interest we feel is that of personal knowledge. It is as
if Time himself were present unseen, whispering to us of a new kindled
love,--of marriage, with all its details of “pomp and circumstance;” and
then comes the deeper social interest,--the opening of a glimpse into
the vista of new generations, while all around the other interests of
life are transacting, and the children we knew at their parents’ knees
are abroad in the world, acting for themselves, and putting a hand to
the destinies of society.
Of all the announcements made in the silence of our solitude, none are
so striking as those of deaths, familiar as the thought of death is to
us, and natural as our own death would appear to ourselves, and to
everybody. To present witnesses, and in the midst of the activity of
life, the spectacle of death loses half its force. It is we who feel the
awful beauty of it, when the great Recorder intimates to us that they
who were strenuous in mutual conflict have lain down side by side; that
to old age its infirmities matter no longer, as the body itself is
surrendered; that the weary spirit of care is at rest, and that the most
active affections and occupations of life have been brought to a sudden
close. Many young and busy persons wish, as I used to wish, that Time
would be prophet as well as watchman. On New Year’s Eves, such long to
divine how many, and who of those they know, will be smitten and
withdrawn during the coming year. We, in our solitude, do not desire to
forestal the unrolling of the scroll. To ponder the register of the
year’s deaths at its close, is enough for us, to whom our seclusion
serves for all purposes of speculation. While we are waiting, every year
conveys away before us the infant, (a new immortality created before our
eyes); the busy citizen, or indispensable mother, (showing how much more
important in the eye of God is it what we are than what we do;) the
young maiden, full of sympathy, (perhaps for us,) and of hope; and the
aged, full of years, but perhaps not less of life. Such is the register
of every year at its close.
To us, whose whole life is sequestered,--who see nothing of the events
of which we hear so much, or see them only as gleam or shadow passing
along our prison-walls, there is something indescribably affecting in
the act of regarding History, Life, and Speculation as one. All are
enhanced to us by their melting into each other. History becomes like
actual life; life becomes comprehensive as history, and abstract as
speculation. Not only does human life, from the cradle to the grave, lie
open to us, but the whole succession of generations, without the
boundary line of the past being interposed; and with the very clouds of
the future so thinned,--rendered so penetrable, as that we believe we
discern the salient and bright points of the human destiny yet to be
revealed.
* * * * *
It would be impossible to set down, within any moderate limits, notices
of changes in the Modes of life,--modes arising from progressive
civilisation, and deeply affecting morals;--but there is one branch of
one great change, which I will mention, as it bears a relation to the
morals of the sick-room.
We all know how the present action of our new civilisation works to the
impairing of Privacy. As new discoveries are causing all-penetrating
physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon
not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities
for every sort of communication work to reduce privacy much within its
former limits. There are some limits, however, which ought to be
preserved with vigilance and care, as indispensable, not only to
comfort, but to some of the finest virtues and graces of mind and life.
It is to be hoped that the privacy of _vivâ voce_ conversation will ever
remain sacred: but it is known that that which ought to be as holy, that
of epistolary correspondence,--(the private conversation of distant
friends,) is constantly and deliberately violated, where there are
certain inducements to do so. The press works so diligently and
beneficially for society at large, that there is a tendency to commit
everything to it, on utilitarian considerations of a rather coarse kind:
and the moment it can be made out that the publication of anything will
and may do some ostensible good, the thing is published,--whatever
considerations of a different or a higher sort may lie behind. If the
people of note in society were inquired of, they would say that the
privilege--the right--of privacy of epistolary correspondence now exists
only for the obscure;--and for them, only till some person meets them
whose zeal for the public good leads him to lay hold on all material by
which anybody may be supposed likely to learn anything. As for people of
note,--their letters are naturally preserved by the recipients: when the
writer dies, these recipients are plied with entreaties and
remonstrances,--placed in a position of cruel difficulty (as it is to
many) between their delicacy of affection for the deceased, and the pain
of being made responsible for intercepting his fame, and depriving
society of the benefit of the disclosure of his living mind.
Under this state of things, what happens? Some destroy, through life,
all the letters they receive, but those on business. Some, with an
agonising heart, burn them after the writer’s death, to escape the
requisitions of executors. Many, alas! resign their privilege of freedom
of epistolary speech, and write no letters which any one would care to
preserve for an hour. Some call in their own letters;--a painful
process, both to writer and receivers. Of such as do not care what
becomes of their letters, there is no need to say anything. Their
feelings require no consideration, for their letters cannot be of a
private,--nor, therefore, of the most valuable kind. The misery of the
liability is in regard to letters of affection and confidence,--letters
which the writer could no more bear to see again than to have notes
taken of the out-pourings of his heart in an hour of confidence. It is
too certain that many such letters are now never written which crave to
be so: and it is much to be feared that some letters, purporting to be
private, are written with a view to ultimate publication; and thus the
receiver is insulted, or there is a sacrifice of honesty all round.
I do not see any probability of a dearth of biographies. I believe that
there will always be interest enough in human life and character to
secure a sufficiency of records of individuals:--that there will always
be enough of persons whose letters are not of a very private
kind,--always enough of provided and exceptional cases to serve society
with a sufficiency of biography, of a duly analytical kind. But if I did
not believe this,--if I believed that the choice lay between a sacrifice
of the completest order of biography and that of the inviolability of
private epistolary correspondence, I could not hesitate for a moment. I
would keep the old and precious privacy,--the inestimable right of
every one who has a friend and can write to him;--I would keep our
written confidence from being made biographical material, as anxiously
as I would keep our spoken conversation from being noted down for the
good of society. I would keep the power of free speech under all the
influences of life and fate,--and leave Biography to exist or perish.
And pretty sure it is of existence. It has, for its material, the life
and actions of all men and women of note;--their printed and otherwise
public writings and sayings;--the recollections of those who knew them;
and, in no small number of cases, material which, however we may wonder
at, we have only to take and be thankful for. A Doddridge keeps a copy
of every letter or note he ever wrote, labelled and put by for
posthumous use. A D’Arblay spends her last hours in elaborating her
revelations of the transactions, private and public, of her day; and
revises, for publication, the expressions of fondness and impulse,
written to sisters and other intimates, long dead. A Rousseau here and
there gives more. One way and another, the resources of biography are
secure enough, without encroachment on a sacred process of intercourse.
Biography will never fail. Would that we were all equally secure of a
higher matter,--our right of freedom of epistolary speech!
“But when all are dead,--and nobody concerned remains to be hurt?”
remonstrates one. The reply is, that as long as people of note, who love
their friends, remain, there are some left to be concerned and injured.
“But,” says another, “would you object to do good, after your death, by
your letters being published?” The reply is that, in the supposition, I
see an enormous sacrifice of a higher and greater good to a lower and
smaller. No letters, in any number and of any quality,--if they
exhibited all the wisdom of Solomon, and all the graces of the Queen of
Sheba, could do so much good as a single clear and strong protest
against the preservation of strictly private letters for biographical
material.
“But,” says another, “had you not better leave the matter to the
discretion of survivors? Surely you can trust your executors;--surely
you can trust the friends who will survive you.” The reply is--when this
critical state of our morals is past, no doubt executors may be trusted
about letters, as about other matters. But the very point of the case is
that its morality is not yet ascertained by those who do not suffer
under the liability, and have not fellow-feeling with those who do. My
executors may very sincerely think it their duty to publish my most
private letters,--and even to be now laying them by in order for the
purpose: while I feel that, once aroused to a view of the liability, I
could more innocently leave to the discretion of survivors the
disposition of lands and money than that of my private utterances to my
friends. In a case of differing or opposing views of duty,--if my own is
clear and stringent, I cannot innocently leave the matter to the chance
of other persons’ convictions. There cannot be a more strictly personal
duty, and I must do it myself.
I have, therefore, done it. Having made the discovery of the
preservation of my letters for purposes of publication hereafter, I have
ascertained my own legal rights, and acted upon them. I have adopted
legal precautions against the publication of my private letters;--I have
made it a condition of my confidential correspondence that my letters
shall not be preserved: and I have been indulged by my friends,
generally, with an acquiescence in my request that my entire
correspondence, except such as relates to business, shall be destroyed.
Of course, I do as I would be done by. The privacy I claim for myself, I
carefully guard for others. I keep no letters of a private and passing
nature. I know that others are thinking and acting with me. We enjoy, by
this provision, a freedom and fulness of epistolary correspondence which
could not possibly exist if the press loomed in the distance, or
executors’ eyes were known to be in wait hereafter. Our correspondence
has all the flow and lightness of the most secret talk. This is a
present reward, and a rich one, for the effort and labour of making our
views and intentions understood. But it is not our only reward. We
perceive that we have fixed attention upon what is becoming an important
point of Morals: and we feel, in our inmost hearts, that we have done
what we could to guard from encroachment an important right, and from
destruction a precious privilege. This may appear a strange statement to
persons whose privacy is safe in their obscurity. Those who know in
their own experience the liabilities of fame, will understand, and
deeply feel, what I have said.
I have mentioned above, that, to us in seclusion, History, Life, and
Speculation, assume a continuity such as would not have been believed
possible by ourselves in former days, when they appeared to constitute
departments of study as separate as moral studies can be. It would be
curious and interesting to an observer of the human mind, to pass from
retreat to retreat, and watch the progress of this fusion of objects; to
see the formerly busy member of society--“the practical man,”--growing
speculative in his turn of thought; the speculative writer nourishing
more and more of an antiquarian taste; and the antiquary finding
seclusion serve as well as the passage of ages, and viewing the modes
and instruments of the life of to-day with the eye and the gusto of the
antiquary of ten centuries hence.
And not only in their studies would men of such differing tastes be
found to be brought together under the influences of sequestration from
the world. There are matters of moral perception and taste in which they
would draw near no less remarkably. The one conspicuous, undying
humanity, which is the soul of all the forms of life that they
contemplate, must be, to all, the sun of their intellectual day, beneath
whose penetrating light all adventitious distinctions melt into
insignificance. Distinctions of rank, for instance, become attenuated to
a previously inconceivable degree. To the antiquary, as well as to the
most radical speculator, there would be little more in the sovereign
entering the sick-room than any other stranger whom kindness might
bring. It requires that we should live in the midst of the arrangements
of society, that our conventional ideas should be nourished by daily
associations, in order to keep up even the remembrance of differences of
hereditary rank, so overpowering in our view are the great interests of
life which are common to all,--Duty, Thought, Love, Joy, Sorrow, and
Death.
If the sovereign were to enter our rooms, there would be strong
interests and affections connected with her, but interests relating to
her responsibilities and her destinies, and scarcely at all to her
rank--to the singularity, and not the exaltation, of her position. It is
a strong doubt to me, whether one of high degree, placed in our
circumstances, could long retain aristocratic ideas and tendencies;
whether to the proudest noble, shut up in his chamber for five years,
the cottage child he sees from his window, the footboy who brings his
fuel, must not necessarily become as imposing to his imagination and his
heart as the young princes of the blood.
Something of the same process takes place, even with regard to the
distinctions of intellectual nobility. As for the nothingness of
literary fame, amidst the stress of personal trial (except in the
collateral benefits it brings), an hour in the sick-room might convince
the most superstitious worshipper of celebrity. As for the rest; in the
presence of the general ignorance, on the brink of that black abyss, our
best lights are really so ineffectual, that it is impossible to pride
ourselves on our intellectual differences, ranging merely as from the
torch to the farthing candle.
In truth, in our retreat, moral considerations are all in all. Moral
distinctions are the chief; and moral interests, common to all, are
supreme. They are so from their essential nature; and they are so to us
especially, from the singular advantage of our position for seeing their
beauty, and the abundance of it. We could make known--what is little
suspected by busy stirrers in the world, and wholly disbelieved by
despondent moralists who dwell amidst its apparent confusion--that there
is a deep heaven lying inclosed in the very centre of society, and a
genuine divinity residing in the heart of every member of it, which
might, if we would but recognise it, check, our longing to leave the
present scene, to search for God and Heaven elsewhere. All, that is most
frivolous and insignificant is ever most noisy and obtrusive; all that
is most wicked is most boastful and audacious; all that is worst in men,
and society, has a tendency to come uppermost; and thus the most
superficial observers of life are the most despondent. Meantime,
whatever is holy, pure, and peaceable, works silently and unremittingly;
and while turbulent passions are exhausting themselves before the eyes
of men, a calm and perpetual renovation is spreading outwards from the
central heart, of humanity. I have the image before my eyes at this
moment--the awful type of the blessed reality--in the tossing sea, which
the neighbours dare hardly look upon. It rages and rolls, it dashes, the
drift-wood on the shore, and heavy squalls come driving over it, like
messengers of dismay. At this very instant, how calm are its depths!
There light dwells, as long as there is light in heaven; and there is no
end to the treasures of beauty on which it shines. If it be a fable that
there are happy beings dwelling there, basking and singing, unconscious
of the tempests overhead, it is certainly true that it is thus in the
upper world, of which the ocean is a type. It is true, as a friend said
to me, that “the dark is full of beautiful things.” Without an image,
speaking in the plainest and most absolute terms, the least known parts
of human life are full of moral beauty. I am fully persuaded, that, if
we wish to extend and confirm our ideas of Heaven, we should not wander
back and afar to the old Eden, or forward and upward to some bright star
of the firmament, but we should look into the retired places of our own
actual world, of our own country, of our own town and village. We should
look into the faces to be met in the street every day; we should look
round by the light of our common sun. However, my immediate business is
to say that we, who are not abroad in the streets, and cannot go in
bodily presence into the by-places of life, have more of this heaven
disclosed to us than others, because we appear to need it more. If any
one of us could and might tell what we know of the good of human hearts,
the heavenly deeds of human hands, the desponding would hang their heads
no longer with fear, but with shame for their fear. If I alone might
make a record of the heavenly aspects which have been presented in this
one room, such a record would extinguish all revilings of man and of
life. And when I think that what has appeared to me must, in natural
course, have appeared to all my companions in infirmity, when I gather
into one all these revelations of the real moral life of society, I
perceive that, till death satisfies us in regard to a local heaven, we
may well be satisfied with that which lies all round about us--not mute,
while tender and pitying voices speak to us; nor wholly unseen, while
tearful or kindling eyes meet our own.
Thus, in some few of its leading aspects, does Life appear to the
invalid.
DEATH TO THE INVALID.
“To smell a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less
are the thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.”
FULLER.
“And yet as angels, in some brighter dreams,
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.”
HENRY VAUGHAN.
What subject is so interesting to the full of life as that of death?
What taste is so universal in childhood and youth as that for learning
all that can be known of the thoughts and feelings of the dying? Did we
not all, in our young days, turn to the death part in all biographies;
to the death articles in all cyclopædias; to the discourses on sickness
and death in all sermon books; to the prayers in the prospect of death
in all books of devotion? Do not the most common-place writers of
fiction crowd their novels with death scenes, and indifferent tragedy
writers kill off almost all their characters? Do not people crowd to
executions; and do not those who stay at home learn all they can of the
last words and demeanour of the sufferers? Are not the visions of heroic
children, (and of many grown children), chiefly about pain and a noble
departure? Is there any curiosity more lively than that which we all
feel about the revelations of persons resuscitated from drowning? Is it
not their nearer position to death which makes sick persons so awful to
children who are not familiar with them,--so interesting a subject of
speculation to all? How is it then with the invalids themselves?
Nothing need be said here of short, sharp, fatal illness. Most of us
know that short, sharp illnesses, not fatal, have not enlightened us
much in regard to death and its appropriate feelings. Either pain or
exhaustion usually causes, in such cases, an apathy which leaves nothing
to be remembered or revealed. I was once told by a child, after some
hours of exhausting pain, what she had overheard below,--that if some
contingency, which she specified, did not arise, I should die before
night. I fully believed it; and I felt nothing, unless it were some
wonder at feeling nothing. Almost every person has a similar anecdote to
tell; and there remains only the short and pregnant moral, that all
preparations for leaving this life, and entering on the next, should be
made while the body is well and the spirit alive.
But how does death appear to those who rest half-way between it and
life, or are very gradually passing over from the one to the other?
Much depends, of course, on how far the vital forces are impaired--on
whether the condition be such as to obscure or to purify the spiritual
vision. If we want to know the effect of nearness and realisation, and
not the pathology of the case, we must suppose the vital powers to
remain faithful, however they may be weakened.
In such cases, I imagine the views of death remain much what they were
before, though they must necessarily become more interesting, and the
conception of them more clear. I know of no case of any one who before
believed, or took for granted, a future life, who began to disbelieve or
doubt it through sickness. I have known cases of those who disbelieved
it in health, seeing no reason to change their opinion on the approach
of death,--being content to have lived--satisfied to leave life when its
usefulness and pleasantness are gone--not desiring a renewal of it, but
ready to awake again at the word of their Creator, if indeed a further
existence be in reserve for them. Such cases I have known: but none of a
material change of views in the prospect of death.
To me, the presumption of the inextinguishable vitality of the spirit
afforded by the experience of material decay, is the strongest I am
acquainted with. No amount of evidence of any fact before the reason, no
demonstration of any truth to the understanding, affords to me such a
sense of certainty as the action of the spirit yields, with regard to
its own immortality, at times when there can be no deception from animal
spirits, or from immediate sympathy with other minds, or from what is
called the natural desire for life. It is a mistake to say, as is
frequently said, that, with regard to a future life, “the wish is father
to the thought,” always or generally. Long-suffering invalids can tell
that there are seasons, neither few nor short, when the wishes are all
the other way,--when life is so oppressive to the frame that the
happiest news would be that we should soon be non-existent,--when,
thankful as we are that our beloved friends, the departed and the
remaining, are to live for evermore with God, and enjoy his universe and
its intercourses, we should be glad to, decline it for ourselves, and
to lie down in an eternal, unbroken rest. At these seasons, when, though
we _know_ all that can be said of renewed powers and relish, and a more
elevated and privileged life beyond the grave, we cannot _feel_ it; and,
while admitting all such consolations as truth, we cannot enjoy them,
but, as a mere matter of inclination, had rather resign our
privileges;--in these seasons, when the wish would be father to an
opposite thought, the belief in our immortality is at the strongest; the
truth of our inability to die becomes overwhelming, and the sleep of the
grave appears too light to satisfy our need of rest. I believe it to be
owing to this natural and unconquerable belief in our immortality, that
suicide is not more common than it is among sufferers. I am persuaded
that the almost intolerable weariness of long sicknesses, unrelieved by
occasional fits of severe pain, would impel many to put out a hand to
the laudanum-bottle, in hours when religious considerations and emotions
cannot operate through the indisposition of the frame, if it were not
for the intense conviction that life would not thus be extinguished, nor
even suspended. I do not believe much in the “natural love of life,”
which is usually said to be the preventive in such cases. I do believe
in the vast operation of religious affections in withholding from the
act: but I also believe in frequent instances of abstinence from death,
from a mere despair of getting rid of life--a sense of necessary
immortality.
I have spoken of the relief afforded by visitations of severe pain.
These rally the vital forces, and dismiss the temptation, by
substituting torture for weariness--at times a welcome change. The
healthy are astonished at the good spirits of sufferers under tormenting
complaints; and the most strait-laced preachers of fortitude and
patience admit an occasional wonder that there is no suicide among that
class of sufferers. The truth is, however, that the influence of acute
pain, when only occasional, and not extremely protracted, is vivifying
and cheering on the whole. The immediate anguish causes a temporary
despair: but the reaction, when the pain departs, causes a relish of
life such as the healthy and the gay hardly enjoy. Though a slow death
by a torturing disease is a lot unspeakably awful to meet, and even to
contemplate, there can be no question to the experienced, that illness
in which severe pain sometimes occurs is less trying than some in which
a different kind of suffering is not relieved by such a stimulus and its
consequent sensations.
Thus much it is useful to know,--useful to the student of human nature,
to the nurse, and to a sufferer under sentence of lasting disease. But
instances have been known, perplexing to those inexperienced in pain, of
devout thankfulness for the suffering itself, under its immediate and
agonising pressure; and this in men far superior to the superstition of
believing present pain the purchase-money of future ease,--the fine paid
down here for admission to heavenly benefits hereafter.
Strange as this rejoicing in misery may appear, it is to some minds as
natural and authorised by the laws of our being, as the joy which
attends the acquisition of a great idea, or the verification of a potent
truth. It is as verification that such pain is welcome. To men of the
most spiritual tone of mind, every attestation of the reality of unseen
objects is a boon of the highest order; and no such attestation can
surpass in clearness that which is afforded by the sensible progress of
decay in the material part of the sufferer’s frame. All attempt at
description is here vain. Nothing but experience can convey a conception
of the intense reality in which God appears supreme, Christ and his
gospel divine, and holiness the one worthy aim and chief good, when our
frame is refusing its offices, and we can lay hold on no immediate
outward support and solace. It is conceivable to the healthy and happy,
that, if waked up from sleep by a tremendous earthquake, the first
recoil of terror might be followed by an intense perception of the
fixity and tranquillity of the spiritual world, in immediate contact
with the turbulence of the outward and lower scene. It is conceivable to
us all that the drowning man may, as is recorded, see his whole life, in
all its minute details, presented to him, as in clear vision, in one
instant of time, as he lapses into death. Well,--something like both
these experiences is that of extreme and dissolving pain, to a certain
order of minds. The vision and the attestation are present, without the
horrors caused, amidst an earthquake, by the misery of a perishing
multitude, though at the cost of more bodily anguish than in the case of
the drowning man. Though there may be keen doubts in a modest sufferer
how long such anguish can be decently endured,--whether the filial
submission will hold out against torment,--there is through, above and
beyond such doubts, so overpowering an impression of the vitality of the
conscious part of us, and of the reality of the highest objects for
which it was created and has lived,--so inexpressible a sense of the
value of what we have prayed for, and of the evanescence of what we are
losing,--that it is no wonder if the dying have been known to call for
aid in their thanksgivings, and to struggle for sympathy even in their
incommunicable convictions. If the shadows of the dark valley part, and
disclose to such an one the regions that lie in the light of God’s
countenance, it is no wonder that he calls on those near him to look and
see, though he is making the transit alone.
Those who speculate outside on the experience of the sick-room, are
eager to know whether this solitary transit is often gone over in
imagination, and whether with more or less relish and success than by
those at ease and in full vigour. In my childhood, I attended, as an
observer, one fine morning, at the funeral of a person with whom I was
well acquainted, without feeling any strong affection. I was somewhat
moved by the solemnity, and by the tears of the family; but the most
powerful feeling of the day was excited when the evening closed in,
gusty and rainy, and I thought of the form I knew so well, left alone in
the cold and the darkness, while everybody else was warm and sheltered.
I felt that, if I had been one of the family, I could not have
neglectfully and selfishly gone to bed that night, but must have passed
the hours till daylight by the grave. Every child has felt this: and
every child longs to know whether a sick friend contemplates that first
night in the cold grave, and whether the prospect excites any emotions.
Surely;--we do contemplate it--frequently--eagerly. In the dark night,
we picture the whole scene, under every condition the imagination can
originate. By day, we hold up before our eyes that most wondrous piece
of our worldly wealth--our own right-hand; examine its curious texture
and mechanism, and call up the image of its sure deadness and decay, And
with what emotions? Each must answer for himself. As for me, it is with
mere curiosity, and without any concern, about the lonely, cold grave.
I doubt whether any one’s imagination rests there,--whether there is
ever any panic about the darkness and the worm of the narrow house.
As for our real future home,--the scene where our living selves are to
be,--how is it possible that we should not be often resorting thither in
imagination, when it is to be our next excursion from our little abode
of sickness and helplessness,--when it is so certain that we cannot be
disappointed of it, however wearily long it may be before we go,--when
all that has been best in our lives, our sabbaths, all sunset evenings
and starry nights, all our reverence and love that are sanctified by
death,--when all these things have always pointed to our future life and
been associated with it, how is it possible that we should not be ever
looking forward to it, now when our days are low and weary, and our
pleasures few? The liability is to too great familiarity with the
subject. When our words make children look abashed, and call a
constraint over the manners of those we are conversing with, and cause
even the most familiar eyes to be averted, we find ourselves reminded
that the subject of a person’s death is one usually thought not easy to
discuss with him. In our retirement, we are apt to forget, till
expressly reminded, the importance of distinctions of rank and property
in society, so nearly as they vanish in our survey of life, in
comparison with moral differences; and, in like manner, we have to recal
an almost lost idea, that death is an awkward topic, except in the
abstract, when our casual mention of a will, or of some transaction to
follow our death, introduces an awe and constraint into conversation.
Such familiarity may be, and often is, condemned as presumptuous. There
may be cases in which it is so; but I think it would be hard to make the
censure general. The confident reckoning on the joys of heaven for one’s
self, on any grounds, while others are supposed to be condemned to a
contrary lot, is a superstition more offensive to my feelings than that
which renders a trembling soul, clinging to life, aghast at the idea of
meeting its Maker and Father. But a soul without any self-complacency,
or ignorant confidence, may yet be easy and eager in the prospect of
entering upon that awful new scene. Setting aside all the inducements
from the hope of relief and rest, the humblest spirit may be conceived
of as tranquil and aspiring in full view of the transition; and this
under a full sense of its sins and failures, and without reliance on any
imaginary security,--without need of other reliance than its Father in
Heaven. There may be--there is--in some, so continual a regard to God in
life, that there cannot seem anything very new and strange in going
anywhere where He is. There maybe--and there is--in some, so earnest a
desire to be purified from sin, that they would undergo anything on
earth to be freed from it, and therefore fear nothing, but rather
welcome any discipline which may be reserved beyond. Knowing that the
revelation of the evil of their sin must be most painful, but also most
necessary to their progress, they are ready, even eager for it, pressing
forward to the suffering through which they hope to be made perfect. If
with such dispositions is joined that ardent, reverential filial love
which generates perfect trust, and rejects any interposition between
itself and the benign countenance in whose light it lives, there may be
nothing blameable or dangerous in the readiness for death, or in the
happy familiarity with which the event may be spoken of. It is a case
in which every man should be slow to judge his neighbour, while the
natural verdict of thoughtful observers would seem to be that a sufferer
under irremediable illness, who preserves a general patience, cares for
others’ happiness more than for his own, and has always lived in view of
an eternal life, can hardly be wrong in anticipating that life with ease
and cheerfulness, whatever analysis or judgment dogmatists may make of
his state of mind.
Whether our imaginings of Death are more or less a true anticipation of
it, can be proved only by experience. It may be found that they are no
more just than my idea of the matter when I was a child, when my brother
and I dug a grave, and then lay down in it, by turns, and shut our eyes,
to try what dying was like. Practically, such failures of conception
cannot matter much. A person who is setting out on foreign travel for
the first time, takes no harm by expecting the voyage and the landing
among foreigners to be something very unlike what they prove. His
preconceptions answered their purpose, by rendering him ready and
willing to go, and preventing his being taken by surprise by the
summons. Still, those of us have greatly the advantage whose minds are
enlarged by knowledge, and their imaginations animated and strengthened
by exercise. Some of the most innocent and kind-hearted people I have
known have been the most afraid of death,--not from consciousness of
sin, but from dread of overpowering novelty--from a horror of feeling
lost among scenes where there is nothing familiar; while, in opposite
cases, a philosophic interest and wonder have been known to go far in
reconciling a highly intellectual man to leaving the companions he loved
best in life.
There can be no question as to the difference in the ease of departure
(moral conditions being supposed the same) of the housewife, whose days
and faculties have been occupied with the market, the shop, and the home
where her whole life has been passed, and the philosopher, whose nerves
thrill with delight, unmixed with terror, at the very first view of the
new wonders revealed by Lord Rosse’s speculum. It is striking, that a
man about to be thrust forth from life for a plot of murder on an
enormous scale, should, while waiting for death the next moment, whisper
to a fellow-sufferer, “Now we shall soon know the great secret;” while
a pure and beneficent being, beloved by God and his neighbour, should
pray to be loaded with any weight of years and sufferings rather than go
from the familiar scene on which he has opened his eyes every day for
sixty years. “Grand secrets” have no charms for him, but only horrors;
and as for new scenes, even within our own corner of the earth,
mountains and waterfalls overpower him, and he shuffles back to shops
and streets.
Let persons so constitutionally different be shut into a sick-room,
knowing that they will issue from it only by death, and what will they
do? By the habit of looking forward to this exit for relief, the timid
may come to speak and think of it as tranquilly as the speculative; but
then, when the sensation overtakes him, the difference is again
apparent. It does seem as if there were in the seizure of death a
sensation wholly peculiar, and which cannot be mistaken. Cases of
unconsciousness are no evidence to the contrary; and there are so many
instances of decisive declaration by the dying, as to make the fact
pretty certain. Then finally appears (supposing both conscious) the
distinction in the act of dying, between the enlarged and speculative
mind and the contracted one which clings to details. Then the harassed
sufferer, who has a hundred times exclaimed, in the struggles of
disease, “O! this is dying many times over!” shudders out at last, in
quite another tone, “O God! this is death!” Then the exhausted
debauchee, after every hollow show of preparation by decorous prayer,
mutters, in the terror of the reality, “O God! this is death!” At such a
time, the philosophic physician, seizing his sole opportunity of
experience of the phenomena of death, keeps his finger on his pulse as
his heart is coming to a stop, and notifies its last beat as a fact in
useful science. At such a time, the diligent Christian--a judge, a rich
man, without a crook in his lot--suddenly sentenced, struggles to
breathe into his wife’s bending ear his last words: “This is death! Our
children ... tell them--I have had everything man could enjoy ... and
all is nothing in comparison with holiness. Pure and holy--make them.
Care for nothing else! O! all is well!” When he could no longer speak or
move, his countenance was full of soul; not a trace of fear upon it, but
a whole heaven of joyful expectation. Here are differences!
Of course, there is no waiting till the last moment for these
differences to show themselves. Outside enquirers may be satisfied that
invalids’ anticipation of death varies with their habits of mind. Some
merely anticipate; some contemplate. With some, the anticipation is
merely of relief and rest; with others it is worthier of our human and
Christian hope. In no case of permanent illness can I conceive the idea
to be otherwise than familiar, under one aspect or another; so familiar,
as that it is astonishing to us that we can obtain so little
conversation upon it as a reality--a certainty in full view. To us this
seems more extraordinary than it would be if the friends of Parry, and
Franklin, or Back, were, as the season for a Polar expedition drew nigh,
to talk to them about everything else, but be constrained and shy on
that. I say “more extraordinary,” because it is not everybody that is
bound, sooner or later, to the North Pole, but only a few crews;
whereas, all have an interest in the passage of that other, that “narrow
sea,” and in the “better country” which is its further shore.
Perhaps the familiarity of the idea of death is by nothing so much
enhanced to us as by the departure before us of those who have
sympathised in our prospect. The close domestic interest thus imparted
to that other life is such as I certainly never conceived of when in
health, and such as I observe people in health do not conceive of now.
It seems but the other day that I was receiving letters of sympathy and
solace, and also of religious and philosophical investigation as to how
life here and hereafter appeared to me; letters which told of activity,
of labours, and journeyings, which humbled me by a sense of idleness and
uselessness, while _they_ spoke of humbling feelings in regarding the
privileges of my seclusion. All this is as if it were yesterday: and
now, these correspondents have been gone for years. For years we have
thought of them as knowing “the grand secret,” as familiarized with
those scenes we are for ever prying into, while I lie no wiser (in such
a comparison) than when they endeavoured to learn somewhat of these
matters from me. And besides these close and dear companions, what
departures are continually taking place! Every new year there are
several--friends, acquaintance, or strangers--who shake their heads when
I am mentioned, in friendly regret at another year opening before me
without prospect of health--who send me comforts or luxuries, or words
of sympathy, amidst the pauses of their busy lives; and before another
year comes round, they have dropped out of our world--have learned
quickly far more than I can acquire by my leisure--and from being merely
outside my little spot of life, have passed to above and beyond it.
Little ones who speculated on me with awe--youthful ones who ministered
to me with pity--- busy and important persons, who gave a cordial but
passing sigh to the lot of the idle and helpless; some of all these have
outstripped me, and left me looking wistfully after them. Such incidents
make the future at least as real and familiar to me as the outside
world; and every permanent invalid will say the same: and we must not be
wondered at if we speak of that great interest of ours oftener, and with
more familiarity, than others use.
Neither should we be wondered at if we speak with a confidence which
some cannot share, of meeting these our friends, and communing with
them, when we ourselves depart. We have no power to doubt of this, if we
believe at all that we shall live hereafter. I have said how intensely
we feel that our spiritual part is indestructible. We feel no less
vividly that of that spiritual part the affections are the true
vitality; that they are the soul within the soul--our inmost life. The
affections cannot exist without their objects; and our congenial
friends--the brethren of our soul--therefore survive as surely as God
survives. If God is recognisable by the worshipper, and Christ by the
Christian, the beloved are recognisable by those who love. To demur to
this to the sufferer who (all other life being weakened and embittered)
lives by the affections, divine and human, is, to him, much like
doubting whether the atmosphere bears any relation to music, or the
human understanding to truth.
If there are hours when, through pain and weakness, we would fain
decline existence altogether, as a sick and wearied child frets at
sunshine and music, and would rather sleep in darkness and silence,
there is no moment in which we do not believe, as if we saw, that the
departed righteous are in communion, full and active, in exact
proportion as the ardour and fidelity of their mutual love deserves and
necessitates. We believe this as if we saw it, whatever be our own
immediate mood, as, on every night of winter, however cloudy, we are
well assured that the constellations are in the sky,--that Orion and the
Wain have risen and are circling, steady, clear and serene, whatever be
the state of the elements below them. As the life of the sick-room must
necessarily be, whether its objects be high or low, one of faith and not
of sight, those who visit it may easily perceive that it is not the
appropriate field for demonstration. In its own province Demonstration
is supreme. There let it dictate and pronounce. But we sufferers inhabit
a separate region of human experience, where there is another and a
prophetic oracle; where the voice of Demonstration itself must be dumb
before that of the steadfast, incommunicable assurance of the soul.
Here are some of the aspects of Death to the long-suffering Invalid.
TEMPER.
“We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.”
SHAKSPERE.
“Behold thy trophies within thee, not without thee. Lead thine own
captivity captive, and be Cæsar unto thyself.”
SIR THOMAS BROWN.
It is very surprising, and rather amusing, to invalids whose
constitution and disease dispose them to other kinds of ill-temper
rather than irritability, to perceive how this tendency, and no other,
is set up as a test of temper by persons inexperienced in sickness.
There are cases, and they are not few, where an invalid’s freedom from
irritability of temper is a merit of a very high order indeed: but there
are many,--perhaps more,--where, to award praise on this ground, is like
extolling the sick person for being worthy of trust with untold gold, or
for his being never known to game or get drunk. This last, indeed,
may,--amidst the sinkings of illness, with wine and laudanum in the
closet,--often be actually the greater merit. It is a case in which
every thing depends on the existence of temptation. Persons suffering
under frequent fever, or certain kinds of pain or nervous disturbance,
or afflicted with ill-qualified nurses, may be pardoned for almost any
degree of irritability, or may be unspeakably meritorious in resisting
the tendency, with more or less steadiness. But there are some of us who
cannot but smile at compliments on our freedom from irritability, when
we feel that we never have the slightest inclination to be cross, nor
have the least excuse for being so,--while we may be most abasingly
aware of other kinds of frailty of temper.
To me it appears that we are, for the most part, in greater peril from
other faults, because they are less looked for, less discussed and
recognised, and we are, therefore, less put upon our guard against them:
and also because their consequences are less immediately and obviously
detrimental to our own comfort. Besides that all persons grow up on the
look-out for irritability of temper, and therefore are more or less on
the watch against it when they come to be ill, it is clear to the idlest
and most selfish mind, that the whole hope of comfort in the sick-room
depends on the freedom and cheerfulness of the intercourse held in
it,--a freedom and cheerfulness forfeited by irritability on the part of
the sufferer,--necessarily forfeited, even if he were tended by the
hands of angels. Children are the brightest, if not the tenderest,
angels of the sick-room; and the alternative between their coming
springing in, not only voluntarily but eagerly, and their being brought,
for observance’ sake, with force and fear, is of itself inducement
enough to self-control on the part of the most fretted patient, in the
most feverish hour. Even in the middle of the night, when no one is by
but the soundly sleeping nurse, the invalid feels admonished to suppress
the slightest moan, when he sees in fancy his little friends the next
morning either leaping from their beds at the joyful thought that they
may visit him, or asking, with awe and gravity, whether they must go,
and how soon they may come away. It is the sweetest of cordials to the
heart of an invalid to learn, by chance, that children count the days
and hours till they may come, and that all their gravity is about having
to go away. It is the most refined flattery to let one know it: and the
knowledge of it may well be almost a specific against ill-temper. And
then again, the nurse. It is by no means sufficient for one’s comfort
that one’s nurse should be well qualified,--ever so trust-worthy, and
ever so kind: it is necessary too that she should be free and happy.
There must be no fear in her tread,--no reserve in her eye,--no
management in her voice--no choice in her tidings. There is no
ill-temper in that jealousy of the invalid’s spirit which requires
assurance of being no burden, and no restraint. It is a righteous
jealousy, and among the most effectual safeguards against the indulgence
of ill-humour. That there are disorders, and seasons of illness, which
almost compel the forfeiture of the mental and moral freedom and ease of
the sick-room, is a painful truth; and those who suffer under such
irresistible or unresisted irritation are supremely to be
compassionated, whether their actual pain of body be more or less. But
it is quite as certain that a large number of sufferers are exempt from
temptation to this kind of failure, being subject, the while, to some
other,--more tolerable, as affecting only, or chiefly, their own
happiness.
The very opposite failure to that of irritability,--which shows itself
in dissatisfaction with others,--is no less common,--unreasonable
dissatisfaction with one’s self. This lowering, depraving tendency to
self-contempt requires for its establishment as a fault of temper, long
protraction or permanence of illness: but when once established, it is
as serious a fault of temper as can be entertained. Where religious
faith and trust are insufficient for the need, this temper is almost a
necessary consequence of any degree of mental and moral activity in a
sick prisoner. The retrospect of one’s own life, from the stillness of
the sick room, is unendurable to any considerate person, except in the
light of the deepest religious humility; and the strongest faith in the
all-wise ordering of the moral world, is no more than sufficient to
counteract that sickening which spreads from the distressed body to the
anxious heart, when intervals of ease and lightness are few and brief.
When to the pains and misgivings of such perpetual retrospect are added
the burdens of a sense of present and permanent uselessness, and of
overwhelming gratitude for services received from hour to hour,--there
is no self-respect in the world that will, unaided, support cheerfulness
and equanimity.
Without self-respect, there can be none of that healthy freedom of
spirit which animates others to freedom, and exerts that influence which
is ascribed to “a good temper,” which removes hesitancy from the
transaction of the daily business of life, and so permits life to appear
in its natural aspect. Instead of this, where the spirit has lost its
security of innocence, unconsciousness, or self-reliance, and become
morbidly sensitive to failures and dangers,--where it has become
cowardly in conscience, shrinking from all moral enterprise, and
dreading moral injury from every occurrence, the temper of anxiety must
spread from the sufferer to all about him, whether the causes of his
trouble are intelligible to them or not. Moral progress, or even holding
what he has gained, seems out of the question for one so shaken; for,
constantly feeling, as he does, that he cannot afford to do the least
questionable thing, and every act being questionable in one aspect or
another, he can only preserve one incessant shrinking attitude before
the fearful ghost of Conscience, instead of bestirring himself to prove
and use his new opportunities of spiritual exertion and conquest. This
abasement may co-exist with the most perfect sweetness and gentleness
of speech and manners, and the sufferer may enjoy great credit for not
being irritable, when he is in a far lower moral state than often
co-exists with irritability.
One effect, deplorably mean and perilous, of such a tendency, is
immediately opposed to the mood which prompts hasty words and
complaints. The sufferer’s spirits rise in proportion to the pain he
experiences. He is never so happy as when he feels his paroxysms coming
on,--not only because pain of body acts as relief from the gnawing
misery of his mind, but because every tangible proof that he is under
chastening and discipline, conveys to him a sense of his
dignity--reassures him, as a child of Providence. From this may follow
too naturally his learning to regard pain as a qualification for
ease--as a purchase-money of future good--a superstition as low and
depraving as almost any the mind can entertain.
To persons in health, and at ease, this detail of the tempers of a
sick-room may well appear fanciful, irrational, and shocking enough. But
the time may come when they may recognise it as true; and, meanwhile, it
will be their wisest and kindest way to receive it with belief. It may
possibly prove the key, even now, to a mystery which otherwise they can
make nothing of, when they see one under tedious suffering, gentle but
low when at ease--evidently borne down by speechless sadness--while, on
the first return of pain, the spirits rise, and the more restless is the
distressed body, the more at ease does the spirit appear. Such a state
may be morbid and perilous; but, the more it is so, the more desirable
it becomes that the attending friend should have an insight into the
case, and a respectful and tender sympathy with it.
As to the remedy, it is easy to say that it is to be found in a cheerful
trust in the Ordainer of our lot. While no one questions this, who can
show how this trust is to be made available at every need, when the
workings of the spirit are all confused, its vision impaired, and its
powers distorted? The only advice that even experience can give in such
an instance, is to revive healthy old associations, to occupy the morbid
powers with objects from without, and to use the happiest rather than
the lowest seasons for leading the mind to a consideration of its
highest relations. As the case is opposite to that most commonly
discoursed of in connexion with the sick-room, so must a wise
ministration be also opposite to common notions; the appeal must be, in
seasons of ease and enjoyment, to the sense of dependence on God; and,
in times of mental distress, to the principles of endurance and
self-mastery.
Other tempers of the sick-room are more easily understood by those
without. The particularity about trifles is one. This, though often
reaching a point of absurdity, should be scrupulously indulged, because
no one but the sufferer can be fully aware of the annoyance of want of
order in so confined a space and range of objects. A healthy person, who
can go everywhere at pleasure, leaving litters to be put away by
servants during absence, can have no idea of the oppression felt by a
feeble invalid, when looking round upon the confusion left in one little
room by careless visitors,--chairs standing in all directions, books
thrown down here and there, and work or papers strewed on the floor. It
is easy to laugh at such trifles--easy to the invalid himself at times;
but if any healthy person will recal his feelings during convalescence
from any former illness, he will remember the sort of painful sympathy
with which he saw the servants going about their work--how his frame
ached at hearing of a long walk, or even at seeing his friends sitting
upright upon chairs. If he considers what it must be to have this set of
feelings for life, he will think the particularity of the invalid not
only worth indulging, but less absurd than in the eye of reason it
appears; and if it be too much to expect of men, it may be hoped that
women visiting the sick may be careful to leave the spaces of the room
clear, not to shake the sofa or the table, to put up books upon their
shelves, and leave all in such a state that the invalid may, immediately
on being left alone, sink down to such rest as can be found.
No one challenges this particularity when it relates to hours. The most
careless observer must know that it is illness of itself to a sick
person to have to wait for food or medicines, or to be put off from
regular sleep. Meantime, the invalid cannot keep too careful a watch
upon the increase of his own particularity--his refuge in custom. There
is something shocking to us invalids, when we fix our meditation upon
this, in our attachments to our own comforts, and cowardice about
dispensing with them. I have myself observed, with inexpressible shame,
that, with the newspaper in my hand, no details of the peril of empires,
or of the starving miseries of thousands of my countrymen, could keep my
eye from the watch before me, or detain my attention one second beyond
the time when I might have my opiate. For two years, too, I wished and
intended to dispense with my opiate for once, to try how much there was
to bear, and how I should bear it: but I never did it, strong as was the
shame of always yielding; and I have now long given up all thoughts of
it. Moreover, though as fully convinced as ever of the moral evil and
danger of being wedded to custom and habits, I have now a far too
decided and satisfactory impression that the sick-room is not the place
for a conquest of that kind, and that it is enough if the patient breaks
through his trammels when he casts off his illness, and emerges again
into the world, which is the same thing as acquiescing in the invalid
for life being a life-long slave to custom and habit. Bad as this is, I
do not see how it is to be helped; for the suffering and injury caused
by irregularity of methods, and uncertainty of arrangements in the
sick-room, seem to show that freedom of this kind does not belong to an
invalid life: and perhaps the most that ought to be required or desired
of the sick person is, rather to welcome than complain of any necessary
interruption to his ways, by a change of nurse, or other accidental
interference with ordinary comforts,--not to extend his particularity
beyond the bounds of his own little domain, and no more to expect the
healthy and active to be, in their own homes, as strict and punctual as
himself, than to desire the servants to leave off rubbing tables and
lighting fires, because it makes his frame ache to think of such work.
If he can preserve sympathy enough in the impulses of the active abroad,
he may hope for indulgence in his particularity at home.
There are other liabilities which may be clear to observers, or easily
conceivable when mentioned. I hardly know whether we may allude, under
the head of Tempers, to the despair which I believe to be universally
felt (however discountenanced), by all, on the assault of very severe
pain. The reason may speak, and even through the lips, of hope and
courage; but the _sensation_ of which I speak is peculiar, so
peculiarly connected with bodily agony, that I cannot but believe it
felt wherever bodily agony is felt. It has nothing to do with the
courage of the soul; affords not the shadow of contradiction to
patience, fortitude, religious trust. I mean simply that when extreme
pain seizes on us, down go our spirits, fathoms deep; and, though the
soul may yet be submissive and even willing, the sickening question
rises,--“How _shall_ I bear this for five minutes? What _will_ become of
me?” And if the imagination stretches on to an hour, or hours, there is
no word but _despair_ which expresses the feeling. The by-standers can
never fully understand this suffering; no, though they may themselves
have suffered to extremity. The patient himself, in any interval, when
devoutly ready to endure again, cannot understand, nor believe in his
late emotion, or fancy that he can feel it again. As it is thus peculiar
and transient, there could be no use in mentioning it, except for two
possibilities; that some sufferer may, in the moment of anguish,
remember that the sensation has been recognised and recorded; and that
attendants, on witnessing a sudden abasement of high courage, on seeing
horror of countenance succeed a calm determination, may remember, at the
right moment, that there is that passing within of which they can have
no conception, and certainly no right to judge.
I might add, as a justification for allusion to so painful a subject,
that it may teach us to honour, in some less faint degree, the strength
of soul of those who, with any composure, die of sheer pain,--of the
most torturing diseases. If, amidst successive shocks of this despairing
sensation, their power of reaction, in the intervals, remains
unimpaired, and they retain their spiritual dignities to the end, no
degree of admiration can transcend their claims.
One strong peril to temper, in the case of a permanent invalid, I do not
remember to have seen noticed, while, I am sure, none can be more worthy
of being guarded against. By our being withdrawn from the disturbing
bustles of life in the world; by our leisure for reading and
contemplation of various sides of questions, and by our singular
opportunities for quiet reflection, we must, almost necessarily, see
further than we used to do, and further than many others do on subjects
of interest, which involve general principles. Through the post, we
hold the best kind of correspondence with the society from which we are
withdrawn; we have the opinions of the wise, and the impressions of the
active, transmitted to us, stripped of much of the passion and prejudice
in which they would have been presented in conversation. Instead of one
newspaper or pamphlet, we now have time to look over several, and can
hear all sides. Far removed from the little triumphs or disappointments
of the day, which warp the judgments of all men who have hearts to feel,
whatever may be their abstract wisdom; endowed with long night hours of
wakefulness, when our spirit of Humanity is all alive; permitted
sequestered days, when our review of historical periods may be
continuous, and when some great new idea, a stalactite of long
formation, at length descends to our level, and touches our heads, or a
diamond of thought, slowly distilled, drops into our hand as we
penetrate and explore;--when some such gain--the guerdon of our
condition--is frequently occurring, it cannot be but that--unless we are
fools, our judgments of things must be worth something more than
formerly. If formerly we associated with our equals, it cannot be but
that we must now see further than they, on such questions of the time as
interest us.
Such divergences of opinion as hence arise require care on the part both
of sick and well, if a perfectly just and generous understanding is to
be preserved between friends.
The liability of us sick is double. We are in danger of forgetting,
amidst the inevitable consciousness of our own improved insight and
foresight, that the activities of life have a corrective as well as a
disturbing influence; and that transient incidents and emotions which do
not reach us, may form real elements of a great question for the week or
the year, though lost in our abstract view of it. In this way, our
judgment may involve great imperfections, which it behoves us to
remember all the more, the less we can supply them. A worse liability is
that to our tempers, of impatience at others not seeing so far as we do.
There is something strange, disappointing and irritating, in finding
those whom we have always regarded as sensible and clear-headed, holding
some expectation which we see to be unreasonable, and offering to our
consideration some fallacy or misty notion, whose incorrectness is to
us as distinct as a cloud in the sky. While religiously careful not to
fret ourselves “because of evil doers,” being so expressly desired, we
are sadly prone to the far worse weakness of fretting ourselves because
of mistaken thinkers. We long to send by a carrier-pigeon the answer or
refutation which seems to us so clear: the post is too slow for us; and
if we do not disburden our minds of their weight of wisdom, we are apt
to spend the night in reiterating to ourselves our triumphant arguments,
in the strongest and most condensed language we can find, till,
exhausted by such efforts, at last the thought occurs to us whether
truth cannot wait,--whether, supposing us ever so right intellectually,
we are not morally wrong in our perturbation. This confession looks
foolish and humbling enough in black and white; but I cannot escape
making it, if, as I intend, I complain of some little injustice on the
other hand, sustained by us.
Where such divergences of opinion arise, men of activity (and women, no
less) are apt, whatever may be their abstract respect for closet
speculators, and reverence for sequestered sufferers, to speak with
regret, or at least with respectful compassion, of the warping
influences of seclusion and illness, as particularly illustrated by the
case in point. They attribute all differences to these causes, and never
doubt that the old agreement would exist, by the invalid’s views being
the same as their own, but for the distorting medium through which the
sick are compelled to regard events; or but for the influence which
certain parties have obtained over his mind, by service or sympathy.
This may be more or less true, in individual cases. Still, it is for the
interests of truth and temper to remind the healthy and busy that the
warp may possibly not be all on one side, and the enlightenment on the
other; and that there may be influences in the life of the meditative
invalid which may render his views more comprehensive, and his judgments
more, rather than less, sound than heretofore. If there is any
practicable test of this, it must be looked for in his habitual tone of
mind and life. Unless this proves perversion or folly, his mind must, in
justice, be held as at least as worthy of consideration as at any former
season of his life. If his fundamental opinions have undergone no
change, but rather enlargement with special modifications, they are
decidedly worthy of more respect than ever.
Thus does my experience moralize for both parties. If, in ordinary life,
there is no peace of mind for those whose happiness depends on the good
opinion of everybody, much less can there be tranquillity of mind in the
sick-room for such. When we are in the world, our presence breaks down
mistaken or slanderous allegations, and we are sure to be seen as we
are, and to be rightly understood, by large numbers of persons,--by all,
indeed, whose opinion is of value to us. But, while sequestered in the
sick-room, we are, in point of reputation, wholly at the mercy of those
who speak of us. It is true, most persons are so humane, and those about
us are so touched by our affliction, as that the best construction is
put on our manners and conduct by the greater number of reporters. But
it is strange and fortunate if there be not, among our acquaintance,
some intrusive person whom we have to keep at a distance,--some meddler
whom we have to check, some well-meaning mischief-maker, of impenetrable
complacency, who will most affectionately and compassionately report us
as sadly changed, unable to value our best friends, or to estimate the
most important services. Whether charges like these arise, or old
misrepresentations reappear, while we are invisible and defenceless, we
may be miserable enough if we let such things trouble us. Those least in
danger, as to temper, are persons of note, who have had former
experience of the diversities of the world’s opinion. They can smile and
wait. But it may be easily conceived that such incidents may be trying
to invalids who are the subjects of notoriety for the first time,--of
that sort of notoriety which affliction creates, through the universal
sympathy of human hearts. Under so new an experience, the sufferer may
feel more vexation by the accidental knowledge of one unjust
representation of his state of temper, than cheered by a hundred
evidences of the esteem and sympathy of those about him. For the evil
there is no help; but there are abundant resources against the
vexation,--the same resources which enable the humble and hoping
Christian, whether strong or weak, rich or poor in outward blessings, to
go through good or evil report with a heart tranquil in Divine Trust,
and occupied with human love.
BECOMING INURED.
“Sunt homines qui cum patientiâ moriuntur: sunt autem quidam
perfecti qui cum patientiâ vivunt.”
ST. AUGUSTIN.
“No cruel guard of diligent cares, that keep
Crowned woes awake, as things too wise for sleep:
But reverend discipline, religious fear,
And soft obedience find sweet biding here!
The self-remembering soul sweetly recovers
Her kindred with the stars: not basely hovers
Below--but meditates the immortal way
Home to the source of light and intellectual day.”
CRASHAW.
We hear, every day, benevolent and compassionate persons, in discussing
the woes of sufferers, dwelling on the thought of such sufferers
becoming inured; and we see them, if possible, reposing on this as the
closing and conclusive idea. How natural this is! How often and how
undoubtingly we did it ourselves, in our days of ease! But how
differently it sounds now! How quickly do we detect in it the discharge
and dismissal of uneasy sympathies! How infallibly do we see how far it
may be true; and what a tale could we tell of what is included in the
phrase, “becoming inured,” where it may be most truly applied! of what
experience is involved in the process, where it is shortest and easiest!
I was lately speaking to a tender-hearted woman, who had known
suffering, but not torment, of more than one case of persons who, dying
slowly under a torturing disease, simply and naturally declared, shortly
before death, the season of their illness to have been the happiest part
of their lives. There are different ways of explaining this fact, which,
though I always believed it, I did not till lately understand. My
friend, however, found no difficulty. She said, in a tone of pitying
tenderness, but of perfect decision, “O! they become inured to it.” I
replied by some slight description of the suffering in the case which
had impressed me most, and asked if she thought use and experience could
soften pain like that. “O yes,” she again said, “they become inured to
it. That is certainly the thing.”
Is it so? I am persuaded it is not. To the great majority of evils men
may become inured; but not to all. To almost every kind, and to vast
degrees of privation, moral and physical, they may become inured; and to
chronic sufferings of mind and body; but I am convinced that there is
no more possibility of becoming inured to acute agony of body than to
paroxysms of remorse--the severest of moral pains. For the sake of both
sufferers and sympathisers, it would be well that this should be
thoroughly understood, that aid may not fall short, nor relief be looked
for in the wrong direction.
The truth is, as all will declare who are subject to a frequently
recurring pain, a familiar pain becomes more and more dreaded, instead
of becoming lightly esteemed in proportion to its familiarity. The
general sense of alarm which it probably occasioned when new, may have
given way and disappeared before a knowledge of consequences, and a
regular method of management or endurance; but the pain itself becomes
more odious, more oppressive, more feared, in proportion to the
accumulation of experience of weary hours, in proportion to the
aggregate of painful associations which every visitation revives. When
it is, moreover, considered that the suffering part of the body is, if
not recovering, growing continually more diseased and susceptible of
pain, it will appear how little truth there is in the supposition of
tortured persons becoming inured to torture.
The inuring process which I hold to be impossible in the cases
mentioned is, however, practicable and frequent in almost all cases of
inferior suffering. But, while all join in thanking God for this, there
is a wide difference in the view taken of the fact by those who feel and
those who only observe it. To the last, it is a clear and satisfactory
truth, shining on the rock of futurity, which they can sit and gaze at
from the window of their ease, commenting on the blessing of such a
beacon-light to those who need it. To those who need it, meanwhile, it
is far far off--sometimes hidden and sometimes despaired of, as the
waves and the billows go over them, and the point can be reached only
through sinkings and struggles, and fears and anguish, with scanty
breathing-times between. Why is this not admitted in the case of the
invalid as it is in that of the person losing a sense? One who is
becoming blind or deaf is sure to grow inured in time; but through what
a series of keen mortifications, of bitter privations! Every one sees
and understands this; while in the case of the invalid, many spring to
the conclusion, overlooking the process of discipline which has, in that
case, as in the other, to be undergone. It should never be forgotten how
different a thing it is to read off this lesson from the clear print of
assertion or observation, and to learn it experimentally, at a scarcely
perceptible rate, “line upon line and precept upon precept;” when every
line is burnt in by pain, and the long series of precepts are registered
by their degrees of anguish.
When the nature of the process has been sufficiently dwelt upon to be
understood--that the hearts of the happy may be duly softened, and those
of the suffering duly cheered by sympathy--then let all good be said of
the inuring process; at least all the good that is true; and that is
much. No wise man will declare that it is the best and healthiest
condition for any one. No wise man will deny that the healthiest moral
condition is found where there is the most abundant happiness. Happiness
is clearly the native, heavenly atmosphere of the soul--that in which it
is “to live and move and have its being” hereafter, and in proportion to
its share of which, now and here, it makes its heavenly growth. The
divinest souls--the loftiest, most disinterested and devoted--all unite
in one testimony, that they have been best when happiest; that they were
then most energetic and spontaneously devoted--least self-conscious.
This must and may joyfully be granted. But, as the mystery of evil is
all round about us, as we have no choice whether or not to suffer, we
may be freely thankful next for the inuring process, as being the
possible means, though inferior to happiness, of divine ends.
Far, indeed, does the sufferer feel from reaching those ends, when he
contrasts his own state with that of the truly happy man. When he looks
upon one so “little lower than the angels,” on his frame, so nerved and
graced by health, his eye emitting the glow of the soul, his voice
uttering the music of the heart, his hand strong to effect his purposes,
his head erect in the liberty of ease, his intellect and soul free from
perplexities and cares, and not only at leisure for the service of
others, but restless to impart to them of his own overflowing good; when
the sufferer contemplates such a being, and contrasts him with himself,
he may well feel how much he has to do, to approach this higher order of
his race. Aware of his own internal tremblings at the touch of the
familiar pain, sinking in weakness before the bare idea of enterprise,
abashed by self-consciousness, smarting under tenderness of conscience,
perplexed and bewildered by the intricacy and vastness of human woe, of
which his own suffering gives him too keen a sense, well may he who is
in the bonds of pain look up humbly to him who walks gloriously in joy;
and the humility might sink into abjectness if the matter ended here, if
the inuring process were not at work. But herein is ample ground for
hope now, and greatness in the future; and if a secondary, still a
sufficient greatness.
The sufferer may well be satisfied, and needs be abashed before no
mortal, if he obtains, sooner or later, the power to achieve divine ends
through the experience of his lot. If, beginning by encountering his
familiar pain, and putting down the dread of it by looking merely to the
comfort of the reaction when it ceases, he attains at length to
conquering pain by the power of ideas; if, ease of body being out of the
question, he makes activity of spirit suffice him; if, his own future in
this life being a blank, he becomes absorbed in that of other men; if,
imprisoned by disease, kingdoms and races are not wide enough for his
sympathies; if, as this or that sense is extinguished, or this or that
limb is laid fast, his spirit becomes more alive in every faculty; if
familiarity with pain enables him so to deal with it, as resolutely to
cut off every morbid spiritual growth to which he has been made liable
by pain; if, instead of succumbing to unfavourable conditions, he has
struggled against dwarfage and distortion, and diligently wrought at the
renewal of the inward man, while the outward frame was decaying day by
day, he may surmount his humiliations, whatever cause for humility maybe
left by so impaired an existence. For him the inuring process will have
done its best.
For those who from constitutional irritability cannot become inured,
there is, daily opening, and at shorter distance, the grave, where “the
weary are at rest.”
For those on whom the inuring process acts amiss,--petrifying instead of
vivifying the soul, we may and must hope, on the ground that they are in
the hands of one whose ways and thoughts are not ours, nor within our
ken. They are a mystery to us, like the cankered buds and blighted
blossoms of our gardens. Or it may be, that there is no corruption or
decay, but only torpidity, induced by the protraction of their polar
night of adversity. It may be, that their life is only hidden away for
a season, and that when the breath of the eternal spring shall dissolve
their icy bonds, they may start forth as new-born, and their preceding
deadness be mercifully counted to them but as a long dream.
There is no danger, no false security to one’s-self, in hoping thus much
for them; for one must be as far from reconciling one’s-self to their
condition as from preferring dreams to contemplation, or the sleep of
the frame to the life of the spirit.
POWER OF IDEAS IN THE SICK-ROOM.
“Turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope.”
ZECHARIAH.
“Wherefore, for virtue’s sake
I can be well content
The sweetest time in all my life
To deem in thinking spent.”
LORD VAUX.
It is amusing (in a somewhat mournful way, however,) to sick people, to
observe how children and other inexperienced persons believe,
notwithstanding all explanation and assurance, that it must be a very
pleasant thing to be ill--gently ill, so as not to be groaning with
pain, or confined to bed. They derive an impression of comfort and
luxury from what they see, which it is impossible to weaken by
descriptions of suffering which they have never felt, and cannot
conceive of. They see the warm room in winter, with its well-cushioned
couch, and think how comfortable it must be never to have the toes
frozen, or a shower of sleet driven in one’s face. The fire in the
chamber all night--the flowers and books that lie strewed about all
day--the pictures on the walls--the dainty meals--the punctual and
careful attendance--these are things which make illness look extremely
pleasant to the healthiest people, who are those that have the keenest
relish for pleasure. Few of such are there who have that insight of
sympathy which drew from my little friend at my elbow the sighing
exclamation--“Ah! but there is the unhealthiness! that spoils
everything!”
Even if the ordinary run of inexperienced persons could see the whole of
our day, I should not expect them to understand the matter much better.
If they saw us turn from the dainty meal, and wear a look of distress
and fear, in the midst of everything that to them indicates comfort and
security, I imagine that they could only wonder, till they knew for
themselves how bodily distress excludes pleasure from outward objects,
and how the mental weaknesses which prevail amidst an unnatural and
difficult mode of life convert the most innocent and ordinary
occurrences into occasions of apprehension, or of self-distrust or
self-disgust.
If they must witness the painful and humbling aspect of the mode of
life, it is much to be wished that they might also see another fact
belonging to it--to them, perhaps, no less mysterious than the misery;
but not the less salutary for that, as it may teach them that there is
much, both of good and evil, in our condition, which it will be wiser in
them to observe than to judge of.
The benign mystery which I would have them witness is, the power of
ideas over us. A child knows something of this in his own way. In
wartime, little boys leave their pet plays to run about and tell
everybody the news of a great battle. A child cannot eat the best dinner
in the world on the day of first going to the play. The doll is thrown
into a corner, when news comes of any acquaintance being burnt out in
the middle of the night; or when anecdotes are telling of any old martyr
who suffered heroically. In their own way, children are conscious, when
reminded, of the power of ideas; but they cannot conceive of our way of
experiencing the same force--to us so renovating! If it is at times
surprising to the most enlightened and sympathising of our companions,
it may well be astonishing to those in the early stages of observation.
They see, with a sort of awe, how priceless are certain pictures to us,
in comparison with all others. They hear us speak of the landscapes, the
portraits, the graceful and beautiful images which adorn the walls; but
they observe how, when restless and distressed, we steal a glance
upwards at one picture, and find something there which seems to set us
right--to rally us at once. If such a picture as the CHRISTUS CONSOLATOR
of Scheffer be within view of the sick-couch--(that talisman, including
the consolations of eighteen centuries!--that mysterious assemblage of
the redeemed Captives and tranquillised Mourners of a whole
Christendom!--that inspired epitome of suffering and solace!)--it may
well be a cause of wonder, almost amounting to alarm, to those who, not
having needed, have never felt its power. If there were now burnings or
drownings for sorcery, that picture, and some who possess it, would soon
be in the fire, or at the bottom of a pond. No mute operation of
witchcraft, or its dread, could exceed the silent power of that picture
over sufferers. Again--if the inexperienced chance to see us in an
unfavourable hour, when our self-control cannot rise beyond
constraint--when our words are fewest, however gentle the voice--when
our posture is rigid, because we will not be restless, and our faces
tell the distress we think we are concealing; if, at such a time, the
post comes in, how miraculous must seem the change to one who does not
know what we have just read in letters or newspapers--and, perhaps,
could not understand its efficacy, if he had seen. He sees us start up
on the couch, hears us become voluble, and talk in a free and joyous
tone;--beholds us eat and drink, without thinking what is put before
us;--perhaps is surprised at a flow of tears, which seems to dissolve
the misery, whatever it was; and finds, to his amazement, that all this
is caused by something to him so dry as the appointment of a committee
in the House--a speech on some hustings--an improved quarter’s
revenue;--or, perhaps, something not dry, but merely curious, and to him
anything but moving,--a new appearance attending an eclipse--an
arrangement for embanking the Nile, or cutting through the Isthmus of
Panama, or some vast discovery in science or the arts. He may, again,
see the relaxation yet more complete,--may perceive, without a word
being spoken, that we are well for the hour,--the eye swimming in
happiness, the voice full of gentle joy; so that he is convinced that
illness does not “spoil everything.” In this case, some comfort has
come, too sacred to be told,--at least then; some news or appeal from
the primary christians and confessors of our day,--the American
abolitionists,--some opening to us for doing some little service,--or,
as not seldom happens, some word of true sympathy which rouses our
spirit, as the trumpet stirs the war-horse,--some sudden light showing
our position on our pilgrim path,--some hint of our high calling,--some
apt warning of a pregnant truth, administered by a wise and loving
comforter.
If I were asked whether there is any one idea more potential than any
other over every sort of suffering, in a mode of life like ours, most
hearers of the question would make haste to answer for me that there is
such a variety of potential ideas, suited to such wide differences of
mood of mind and body, that it must be impossible to measure the
strength of any one. Nevertheless, I should reply that there is one, to
me more powerful at present than I can now conceive any single idea to
have been in any former states of my mind. It is this; that it matters
infinitely less what we _do_ than what we _are_. I can conceive the
amazement of many at this announcement,--of many even who admit its
truth, and feelingly admit it, as I myself did when it was first brought
home to me from the printed page of one friend by the heart-breathing
voice of another. I care not who wonders, and who only half understands,
while there are some few to whom this thought may be what it is to me.
No one will be so short-sighted as to apply it as an excuse for
indolence in the active and healthy,--so clear is it that such cannot
_be_ what they ought to be, unless they _do_ all they can. But perhaps
it is only the practised in human sorrows who can see far enough into
the boundless truth of this thought to appreciate its worth to us.
Suffice it here that it has the power I ascribe to it, and that we whom
it _has_ consoled long to administer it when we see old age restless in
its infirmity, activity disappointed of its scope or instruments, or the
most useful agents of society, the most indispensable members of
families paralysed by disease. We long to whisper it in the dungeons of
Spielberg, where it opens a career within the narrowest recess of those
thick walls. We long to send a missive to every couch, of the sick, to
every arm-chair of the aged and the blind, reminding them that the great
work of life is ours still,--through all modes of life but that of the
madhouse,--the formation of a heavenly soul within us. If we cannot
pursue a trade or a science, or keep house, or help the state, or write
books, or earn our own bread or that of others, we can do the work to
which all this is only subsidiary,--we can cherish a sweet and holy
temper,--we can vindicate the supremacy of mind over body,--we can, in
defiance of our liabilities, minister pleasure and hope to the gayest
who come prepared to receive pain from the spectacle of our pain; we
can, here as well as in heaven’s courts hereafter, reveal the angel
growing into its immortal aspect, which is the highest achievement we
could propose to ourselves, or that grace from above could propose to
us, if we had a free choice of all possible conditions of human life. If
any doubt the worth of the thought, from the common habit of overlooking
the importance of what is _done_ in its character of index of what the
agent _is_, let him resort at once to the fountain-head of spiritual
exemplification, and say whether it matters most what Christ was or
what he did.
The worth of this particular thought is a separate consideration from
that of the worth of any sound abstract idea to sufferers liable to a
besetting personal recollection, or doubt, or care. But, before I speak
of this, I must allude to a subject which causes inexpressible pain
whenever it occurs to us sick prisoners. I have said how unavailing is
luxury when the body is distressed and the spirit faint. At such times,
and at all times, we cannot but be deeply grieved at the conception of
the converse of our own state, at the thought of the multitude of poor
suffering under privation, without the support and solace of great
ideas. It is sad enough to think of them on a winter’s night, aching
with cold in every limb, and sunk as low as we in nerve and spirits,
from their want of sufficient food. But this thought is supportable in
cases where we may fairly hope that the greatest ideas are cheering them
as we are cheered; that there is a mere set-off of their cold and hunger
against our disease; and that we are alike inspired by spiritual vigour
in the belief that our Father is with us,--that we are only
encountering the probations of our pilgrimage,--- that we have a divine
work given us to carry out, now in pain and now in joy. There is comfort
in the midst of the sadness and shame when we are thinking of the poor
who can reflect and pray,--of the old woman who was once a punctual and
eager attendant at church,--of the wasting child who was formerly a
Sunday-scholar,--of the reduced gentleman or destitute student who
retain the privilege of their humanity,--of “looking before and after.”
But there is no mitigation of the horror when we think of the savage
poor, who form so large a proportion of the hungerers,--when we conceive
of them suffering the privation of all good things at once,--suffering
under the aching cold, the sinking hunger, the shivering
nakedness,--without the respite or solace afforded by one inspiring or
beguiling idea.
I will not dwell on the reflection. A glimpse into this hell ought to
suffice, (though we to whom imagery comes unbidden, and cannot be
banished at will, have to bear much more than occasional glimpses;) a
glimpse ought to suffice to set all to work to procure for every one of
these sufferers, bread and warmth, if possible, and as soon as
possible; but above everything, and without the loss of an hour, an
entrance upon their spiritual birthright. Every man, and every woman,
however wise and tender appearing and designing to be, who for an hour
helps to keep closed the entrance to the region of ideas,--who stands
between sufferers and great thoughts, (which are the angels of
consolation sent by God to all to whom he has given souls,) are, in so
far, ministers of hell,--not themselves inflicting torment, but
intercepting the influences which would assuage or overpower it. Let the
plea be heard of us sufferers who know well the power of ideas,--our
plea for the poor,--that, while we are contriving for all to be fed and
cherished by food and fire, we may meanwhile kindle the immortal
vitality within them, and give them that ethereal solace and sustenance
which was meant to be shared by all, “without money and without price.”
It seems but just (if we may venture so to speak), that there should be
the renovating power in ideas that I have described, for our worst
sufferings arise from an unmitigated power of ideas in another sort. I
am not qualified by experience to speak of severe continued bodily
torment, but all testimony seems to concur with all our experience,
that there is no such instrument of torture as a besetting thought. The
mere description of the suffering, given by those who know it, seems to
have wrought upon the general mind, for a kind of shudder goes round
when it is mentioned, though it can no more be conceived of by the gay
and occupied, than the continual dropping of water on the head can be
imagined by him whose transactions with the element consist in a plunge
bath every morning. It is known, however, that herculean men have shrunk
to shadows under the infliction, that it has reduced heroes to tremble
at the whispering wind, or the striking of the clock, that it turns the
raven-hair gray, lets down genius into idiocy, and starves the most
vigorous life into an atrophy. How then are the sick to meet this woe,
which comes upon them with force exactly proportioned to their weakness!
If every sick prisoner in our land were questioned, and could and would
answer truly, I believe all would reply (all who have minds) that their
worst pangs are in the soul. For the moment,--for the hour,--no agony
is, I know, to be compared with some pains of body; but when the
question is of months and years (including the seasons of delicious
reaction from bodily pains), I am confident that the peculiar misery of
our condition--subjection to a besetting thought--will be owned to
absorb all others. Whether the thought relate to any intellectual
matter, or whether it be self-abasement and self-weariness at the
perpetually-recurring apparition of sins, follies, trifling old
misadventures and misbehaviour, or whether some more serious cause of
remorse, the tormenting and weakening effects are much alike; the cold
horror at waking up to the thought in the middle of the night, knowing
that we shall sleep no more; the misery of opening our eyes upon a new
day, with the spell of the thought full upon us; the dread of giving
ourselves up to thinking, and yet the inability to read, while the enemy
is hovering about the page; the faint resolution, broken almost as
surely as formed, not to speak of this trouble to our nearest and
closest friend, and the ending in speaking of it, in our agony, to many
besides. O! there is no aching, no shooting or throbbing pain of fibre
or nerve that can (taken with its alternations) compare in misery with
this! Even the anticipation becomes in time the worst, though the bodily
pain is known to be real and unavoidable, while the ideal one is clearly
seen to be baseless, or enormously exaggerated. The close observer of a
sick sufferer may see the drops stand on the forehead, and the quiver
pass over the lip, at the bare thought of the certain return of a
periodical pain; but worse to endure is the sickening of the soul, at
the certainty that at such an hour we shall be under the spiritual
dominion of a haunting demon, the foe, as foolish as cruel, whom we defy
now with our reason, but shall then succumb to in every faculty. Here is
an ordeal for the proud! yet it is not less fearful to the humble; for
the humble can no more dispense with self-respect than the proud.
Some may wonder at such a history of an unknown trouble,--some who, when
anything harasses them, mount a horse, and gallop over the sea-sands or
the race-course, or visit their friends or the theatre, or resort to
music, or romp with children. Let them remember that we cannot do these
things,--that the very weakness which subjects us to these troubles,
forbids our escape from them. We know, as well as they, that if once we
could feel the open air upon our brows, our feet on the grass, our
bodies in exercise and vigour, all would be well with us; but, as we
cannot use these remedies, the knowledge is of no immediate avail. If we
can get to the window and look abroad, that is well, as far as it goes;
but we are most subject to our tyrant in the night, and in
midwinter,--at times when we cannot look abroad; and it may even happen,
too, that the tyrant dims the sun at noon-day, and blots out the
landscape, or renders us blind to it. What then is to be done? We evade
the misery, when we can, by stirring books, (the most objective that can
be had), or by seeing what we can of the world by the telescope, or by
resorting to some sweet familiar spring of poetry; but this last
expedient is impaired by the fear of mixing painful associations with
pleasures too sacred and dear to be endangered. Or we defy the foe in
reckless anguish, or we endure in silent patience.
But there is something far better to be done,--not always; but still,
not seldom. We can turn the forces of ideas against themselves--meet
them with their own weapons. We can call in the power of an idea to
overcome the tyranny of another idea; and then we come off conquerors,
and with a soul-felt joy.
It is a joy to recur, in memory or imagination, to any moral conflict,
past or possible, in which all our faculties are needed, and wherein
that force is at least conceived to be employed which must otherwise
corrode us. But if any such enterprise actually presents
itself--confronts us at the moment--how great is the blessing! It may
bring toil and difficulty to ourselves, and doubt and blame from others;
but if it be clear to ourselves, how keen is the sense of life it gives
at some seasons, though it may overpower our weakness at others! It
seems hard, when we are feeble and suffering, to have irksome labour to
do, to have to oppose the wishes and feelings of some whom we love, and
to arouse argument when our longing is for unbroken and lasting rest:
but, if our duty be but clear to ourselves, (or for the most part clear,
with doubts only in our most sickly hours,) what a new position we find
ourselves in, permitted once more to take the offensive side against
evil, in alternation with the weary perpetual defensive posture! Happy
they, who have been brought up in allegiance to Duty, more or less
strict; and happiest they whose loyalty has been the strictest! In the
hour of nature’s feebleness, and apparent decay, they find themselves
under the eye and hand of the Physician of souls, who has for them a
cordial of heavenly virtue--of heavenly virtue for them, but of no
virtue to such as have let their moral nature take its chance, and who,
in their hour of extreme need, are no more capable of spiritual
enterprise than of a bodily flight beyond the precincts of their pain.
They must languish in self-corrosion; while they who happily find how
Duty gives “power to the faint,” “mount up with wings as eagles.” With
every emergency of singular or unpopular moral action, every occasion
for saying with courage a true word, or advocating a neglected
cause--with every opportunity, in short, of spiritual enterprise, they
soar afresh, and their eyes kindle anew in the light of life.
But this kind of solace could not be,--nor any effectual kind,--but for
the power of the master idea of our life. But for Him who “stirreth up
the nest,” and whose spirit “taketh and beareth them up” sunwards on her
wings, the flights of these eagle spirits would utterly fail. But for
the ideas inspired by Faith, there could be no enterprise, no true
solace, no endurance but of the low, merely submissive kind. Great is
the power of all thought, congenial with our nature, over disease of
body and morbid tendencies of the mind; but those which connect us with
the Maker of our frame and the Ordainer of our lot are absolutely
omnipotent. O! let the speculative observer of human nature consider
well, and observe that human nature to its extremest limits, before he
pronounces that our spirits are not created filial. Let him ponder well
the universal aspiration towards a spiritually-discerned parent, before
he declares the affection a mere venerable superstition. Let him feel in
health and full action,--(or, if he feels it not, let him detect in
others,) the pausing horror of a sense of orphanhood, beneath which the
moral universe falls in pieces under the hands of its myriad builders.
Let him see in the sick-chamber, where the outward and inward world seem
alike to the sufferer to be crumbling asunder, how irresistible is the
conviction of an upholding power, new-modelling all decaying things, and
imbuing them with immortality. If he himself can but learn what
protracted sickness is, let him ponder well whether a superstition,
however early and solemnly conveyed and cherished, could stand the
stress,--not merely of pain, but of the questionings prompted by pain.
Let him say if it can be anything but truth,--absolute congeniality with
our souls,--which can give such all-conquering power to the idea of our
filial relation to the Ruler of all things.
No one will venture to say how this power is enhanced by the earliest
associations. No one will presume to declare precisely how happy above
others are they, now sufferers, whose infant speech was practised in
prayer at a mother’s knee, and who can now forget the dreariness of the
night and the weight of the day in listening for the echoes of old
psalmody, and reviving snatches of youthful hymns and religious reverie.
No one will dare to say how far the sweet call to “the weary and heavy
laden” is endeared by the voice of the Shepherd having gone before us
over all the hills and vales of our life. But the true philosopher must,
as it seems to me, be assured that the power of these spiritual appeals
would ooze away, in proportion as our faculties are weakened by
disease, if they had not in them the divine force of truth to urge them
home.
See what this force is, in comparison with others that are tendered for
our solace! One and another, and another, of our friends comes to us
with an earnest pressing upon us of the “hope of relief,”--that talisman
which looks so well till its virtues are tried! They tell us of renewed
health and activity,--of what it will be to enjoy ease again,--to be
useful again,--to shake off our troubles and be as we once were. We
sigh, and say it may be so; but they see that we are neither roused nor
soothed by it.
Then one speaks differently,--tells us we shall never be better,--that
we shall continue for long years as we are, or shall sink into deeper
disease and death; adding, that pain and disturbance and death are
indissolubly linked with the indestructible life of the soul, and
supposing that we are willing to be conducted on in this eternal course
by Him whose thoughts and ways are not as ours,--but whose
tenderness.... Then how we burst in, and take up the word! What have we
not to say, from the abundance of our hearts, of that benignity,--that
transcendant wisdom,--our willingness,--our eagerness,--our sweet
security,--till we are silenced by our unutterable joy!
Whence this imbecility of the “hope of relief?”
Whence this power of the idea of God our Father?
Do we know of anything stronger and higher than ideas? In the strongest
and highest,--(even an omnipotent and infinite) idea,--if we have not
Truth, what _is_ Truth?
SOME PERILS AND PAINS OF INVALIDISM.
“But few that court retirement are aware
Of half the toils they must encounter there.”
COWPER.
“We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle.”
JOHNSON.
I desire to notice, very briefly, some perils and pains of our
condition,--briefly premising that, as only the initiated can fully
sympathise, it will be sufficient, and therefore best, to indicate
rather than expatiate.
We are in ever-growing danger of becoming too abstract,--of losing our
sympathy with passing emotions,--and particularly with those shared by
numbers. There was a time when we went to public worship with
others,--to the theatre,--to public meetings; when we were present at
picnic parties and other festivals, and heard general conversation every
day of our lives. Now, we are too apt to forget those times. The danger
is, lest we should get to despise them, and to fancy ourselves superior
to our former selves, because now we feel no social transports.
A lesser danger is that of fearing to experience emotions. If a
barrel-organ makes itself heard from the street,--or a salute, on
anniversaries, from the castle,--or a crowd gathers on the ridge to
enjoy a regatta,--what a strange thrill comes over us! What a shrinking
from being moved! How we wonder when we recal some discourse, whereby
the voice of the preacher roused the souls of a multitude at once,--or
when we awake within us the echoes of some Easter anthem, or of the
Hallelujah Chorus in Westminster Abbey,--or when we image to ourselves a
crowded theatre, when one tragic fear or horror bound together all the
spirits that came for pleasure! When we try to imagine a flow of talk in
which minds uttered themselves without thought of individuals;--when we
revive these scenes of our former lives, we gasp for breath,--we wonder
what we could have been made of to endure the excitement;--we are
certain that we should die on the spot if we encountered it now. It
might be so: but we must remember that our present condition is the
morbid one, and not the former. We must keep up our sympathies, as far
as we may, by cherishing such festal feelings as may survive; and ever
remembering that our grave, and solid, and abstract life is adapted to
only a portion of our nature, and that our exclusion from spontaneous
emotions,--from all experience of sympathetic transport,--is a heavy
misfortune, under which it behoves us to humble ourselves.
Those of us are well off who have, like myself, the advantage of some
outward symbol which serves as communication between them and the world.
Flags are my resource of this kind. Little do those who hoist them
imagine how a hidden invalid appropriates their signals! The Union Jack
on the flag-staff, in the castle-yard, marks Sunday to me in a way I
would not miss. When I look abroad on Sabbath mornings, it tells of rest
and church-going; and it is a matter of serious business with me to see
it brought down at sunset,--a mute token in which there is more pathos
than I could tell. And then the flags on the churches of the opposite
shore on festal days tell me of a stirring holiday world,--make me hear
again the Park and Tower guns,--show me fireworks and illuminations, and
arouse something of the hum and buzz of a gay and moving crowd. Once
more, the foreign flags hoisted by ships coming into port,--mere
signals for pilots in intention,--speak, unknown to any one, a world of
things to me. I learned them long ago, by heart, and with my heart. When
I see a foreign vessel come bounding towards the harbour, and perceive,
the moment she hoists her flag, whether she has cut across from a Norway
fiord, or has contested her way from the Levant, or found a path from
the far Indies, or brings greetings from some familiar American
port,--what a boon is that flag to me! Sometimes I point my telescope,
to see the sailors’ lips move in the utterance of a foreign tongue: at
all events, I see in a moment the peaks of Sulitelma or of the Andes, or
the summits of the Ghauts, or tropical sands, or chilly pine forests
spread before me, or palmy West Indian groves. It is morally good, and
unspeakably refreshing, to have some such instrumentality of signals
with the world without, as these flags are to me.
There is a corresponding danger, though a less serious one, in such
sympathy as we have making us repine. Though we may go on from month to
month without one momentary wish that things were otherwise with us than
as they are, yet, on occasion--once, perhaps, in a year--some incident
wakens a thrill of longing to be as we once were. Some notice of a
concert, or a picture, brings up the associations of a London spring,
with all its intellectual and social pleasures:--or the mere mention of
a lane or hedge, at the moment the March sun is shining in, recals the
first hunting for violets in our days of long walks:--or a foreign
post-mark in autumn transports us to Alpine passes or the shores of
Italian lakes; and a sickly longing for scenes we shall see no more
comes over us. But the reaction is so rapid and sure, that there is
little moral peril in this--only the evanescent pain, which gives place
to that act of acquiescence which has in it more joy than can be
gathered from all the lanes, mountains, and shores of the globe.
The occasional sense of our being too weak for the ordinary incidents of
life, is strangely distressing. The cry of an infant makes us wretched
for hours after, in spite of every effort of reason. I saw, through my
telescope, two big boys worrying a little one, and I could not look to
see the end of it. They were so far off that there was nothing to be
done. The distress to me was such--the picture of the lives of the three
boys was so vivid--that I felt as if I had no reason nor courage left.
The same sort of distress recurred, but in a more moderate degree, when
I saw a gentleman do a thing which I wish could dwell on his mind as it
does upon mine. I saw, through the same telescope, a gentleman pick up
from the grass, where children had been playing the moment before, under
the walls of the fort, a gay harlequin--one of those toy-figures whose
limbs jerk with a string. He carried it to his party, a lady and another
gentleman, sitting on a bench at the top of the rocks, whose base the
sea was washing. When he had shown off the jerkings of the toy
sufficiently, he began to take aim with it, as if to see how far he
could throw. “He never will,” thought I, “throw that toy into the sea,
while there are stones lying all about within reach!” He did it! Away
whirled harlequin through the air far into the sea below: and there was
no appearance of any remonstrance on the part of his companions! I could
not look again towards the grass, to see the misery of the little owner
of the toy on finding it gone. There was no comfort in the air of
genteel complacency with which the three gentry walked down from the
rocks, after this magnanimous deed. How glad should I be if this page
should ever meet the eye of any one of them, and strike a late remorse
into them! To me the incident brought back the passions of my
childhood--the shock I have never got over to this hour--on reading that
too torturing story of Miss Edgeworth’s, about the footman, who “broke
off all the bobbins, and put them in his pocket, rolled the
weaving-pillow down the dirty lane, jumped up behind his lady’s
carriage, and was out of sight in an instant.” I think these must be the
words, for they burnt themselves in upon my childish brain, and have
stirred me with passion many a time since; as this harlequin adventure
will ever do.
Many will wonder at all this--will despise such sensitiveness to
trifles, considering what deeds are done every day in the world. They do
not know the pains and penalties of sickness--that is all: and it may do
them no harm to learn what they are, while my fellow-sufferers may find
some comfort in an honest recognition of them.
This sensitiveness takes worse directions, however, and inflicts more
misery still. It subjects some of us to a scrupulosity, particularly
about truth, which brings endless troubles. Every mistake of fact that
we happen to know of afflicts us as if we were responsible for it,--and
more than it ought if we were so responsible. We tend to an absurd
restlessness to set everything right; and of course, above all, what
concerns ourselves. If any kind friend pities us too much, and praises
us for our patience under sufferings which he supposes to be greater
than we are actually enduring, we remonstrate, and explain, as if his
sympathy were not good for him and us, at any rate; and as if, having
told only truth ourselves, it could matter much how our troubles are
rated--whether over or under. We call up images of all who suffer far
more than ourselves, and implore him to go and pity them--to honour them
and not us. If he smiles and answers, well, he will go and pity and
honour them--but he must be sorry for us, too--we smile, also, at our
own scrupulosity, though we see in it only a new symptom of disease.
There is yet a worse direction taken by this sensitiveness--both morally
and in experience worse. Though our observation of life encourages hope,
on the whole, to a boundless extent, both as to affairs and to human
character, it teaches some truths about individual characters which are
almost too much for our weakened condition. It may be absurd--it may be
wrong--to be more afflicted about the faults and failings of the best
and most beloved people, than about the vices and gross follies of a
lower order of men; but such affliction is, to us, quite inevitable. It
is not wholly irrational; for it is a melancholy sight to witness the
encroachment of any bad habit of mind in those who should be outgrowing
such bad habits, instead of being mastered by them. But we know it to be
the common order of things that every man, even the best, carries about
with him through life some fault or failing (the shadowy side of his
brightest quality, if nothing worse), and that it is the rarest thing in
the world to see any strong tendency overcome after the age of
resolution, the youthful season of moral heroism, is past: yet, knowing
this, it is not the less painful to witness it, with the clearness and
strength with which the spectacle offers itself to us, on our post of
observation. While working in the world, side by side with those whose
doings we now contemplate, we were willing to be deceived in each
particular instance; willing to expect that the judgment and action of
those we loved and clung to would, in each case, be accordant with their
best gifts and graces; and, however often disappointed, we made
allowance for the known frailty, and inconsistently hoped it would be
better next time. We now see too clearly to be deceived. With the
discernment of love, and the power of leisure, we can accurately
calculate the allowance to be made--we can precisely measure the
obliquity beforehand--and save ourselves at least from disappointment.
But there is no solace in this. There is more pain in the proof of the
permanent character of faults (permanence including inevitable growth),
than in perpetual new evidence of their existence; more sorrow in our
prophetic power now than in our credulous weakness of old. The accurate
readers of human character may be admired and envied for their
infallible knowledge of how men will think and act; but, if they have a
true heart-love for those whom they watch, they cannot much enjoy their
power. If they have not love, neither can they be happy; so that it
requires a penetrative knowledge indeed, into the ways of God as well as
man, for such skill to be reconcileable with peace and with our human
affections. It is a burdensome knowledge for us to wield, in our
weakened condition, and one which it requires an ever-strengthening
faith to convert into a nourisher of love.
The faults I have alluded to are such only as are compatible with
general sincerity--such as have a character of frailty. Those which
include tendencies essentially low--untruth, double-dealing, and selfish
policy--assume so disgusting an aspect, when tested by the trying light
and amidst the solemn leisure of the sick-room, that it cannot be wrong
to follow willingly the irresistible leadings of nature--to dismiss them
with loathing, and invite to our arms the simple and heroic sincerity,
and the cheerful devotedness to the honour of God and the interests of
man, which here assume much of the radiance in which they come back in
vision from beyond the grave. If it be true that our moral taste becomes
more sensitive in our seclusion, I trust that such sensitiveness has not
necessarily any fastidiousness in it, but that its relish of good grows
in full proportion to its discipline. I trust that if its disgust
deepens as the low and cowardly order of faults are stripped to
nakedness, so does its appreciation become more expanded and generous in
regard to qualities which befit our heroic and aspiring nature and
destination.
As for our best resource under the liabilities I have alluded to, a mere
reference will suffice. “Whatsoever things are honest, pure, holy,
lovely--to think on these things;” to fill our souls with conceptions of
the god-like, so that our sensitiveness may turn in time to a keen
apprehension of all that is in affinity with these; this is what we have
to do--partly for present solace, and much more for the chance of
converting our weakness into power--our mortal discipline into a
heavenly habitude.
As for the ordinary and familiar sufferings and dangers of our state,
the weariness of life which every one but the physician wonders at,
often as it is witnessed; the longing for non-existence, which some
pious people, who admit no bodily origin of any mental affection, are
very much shocked at; the despair during protracted violent pain, which,
however, being dumb, is seldom known at the moment--these cannot be
illustrated, nor remedied, by anything that can be said on paper. One
can only suggest to the sufferer, and to wise nurses, that in the power
of ideas we are furnished with an implement of natural magic which may
possibly operate at the most hopeless times. It was in a sort of despair
that the father of the lame child, inconsiderately led out too far, gave
the boy his stick to ride home on; whereupon the aching foot actually
traversed the needful mile without being felt to ache. So the wise nurse
may possibly find that a nobler idea than any hope of rest or relief may
reanimate a spirit under a far severer pain. And assuredly there are
some who could tell how, in the midst of anguish, the briefest
suggestion of endurance, the slightest spiritual touch upon deep filial
affections, has made a miraculous truce for them with torment and
despair.
Observers of the sick think very seriously of their liability to become
wedded to their own ways, and engrossed by their own occupations. The
fact is as they see it; but it would be happy for us if we had no worse
mistakes to apprehend. Those of the sequestered who may re-enter the
world will be pretty sure to fall in love with new ways and employments,
and to feel a quite sufficient disgust with their own. And if they are
never to re-enter life, is it not well for them that they can spend some
energies, which would otherwise be corrosive, upon outward things? If
their souls are too narrow and purblind to live beyond the bounds of
their abode, the best thing for them is to get through the rest of their
time as easily as they can, in the way that suits them best. If they are
of a higher order, their observers may be assured of two things--that
their investment of energy on the ways and occupations of their singular
and trying life, is no more than a needful absorption of a power which
would otherwise destroy them; and also, that there is no fear of these
things becoming indispensable to them or sufficient for them. There are
hours, witnessed by no observers, when they find it wise to desist from
their most esteemed employments, in condescension to their own weakness,
and recognise in this discipline the lesson of the day. There are hours,
witnessed by no observers, when the insufficiency of such objects is
felt as keenly and pressingly as by the Missionary on his way to the
heathen, or the Prime Minister with the interests of nations in the
balance before his eyes--or by the drowning man before whose soul life
lies pictured in the instant of time which remains to him. This
liability, though real, is insignificant and transient, compared with
many others.
There is a safeguard against it, too, in our own weakness. There is
even, for some, a danger of growing absolutely idle, from a sense of the
littleness of what they can do. Formerly they acted on the rule--“not a
day without a line,” and now, thrown out of their habit by the absolute
incapacity of some days, and disheartened by the small show made by
their utmost rational diligence, they give up, and do nothing,--or
nothing with regularity. This is a fearful danger. Nowhere are habits of
regular employment more necessary than in such a life as ours; and, if
we cannot preserve the absolute erectness of rationality,--if we must
lean to the error of particularity or of indifference--I have no doubt
of the former being the safer of the two;--the least injurious, and the
most curable under a change of influences.
One of our most humbling and trying liabilities I do not remember to
have seen mentioned anywhere, though it is so common and so deeply felt,
that I have no doubt of a response from every sick prisoner (of a
considerate mind), whose eye will fall upon this page, I mean our
unfitness for doubtful moral enterprise. For _doubtful_ moral
enterprise, let it be observed. Where the case is clear, where the right
appears to our own eyes to be all on one side, whatever may be on the
other, moral enterprise becomes our best medicine; it becomes health and
new life to us, as I have elsewhere said, be the responsibility and the
immediate consequences to ourselves what they may. But when the case is
not so clear, when we are pressed (as all conscientious people, sick or
well, strong or feeble, are at times) by antagonist considerations of
duty, we cannot, as in our vigorous days, take a part in some clear
hour, and strengthen ourselves to bear recurring doubts, and to take
cheerfully even conviction of mistake, if experience should prove our
conscientious decision to have been unsound. We are not in a condition
to bear recurring doubts, or to take cheerfully a conviction of moral
mistake. Our duty, in our depressed circumstances, is to avoid such
moral disturbance as we have not force to quell. We must, in submission
and compassion to our own weakness, evade a decision if we honestly can;
and if we cannot, we must accept of help--human help--and proceed upon
the opinion of the soundest and most enlightened mind we can appeal to.
If there are any who lift the eyebrows, and shrug the shoulders at the
supposition of this case, and declare that there is infallible direction
to be found, in all particular cases, in the principles of religion, in
answer to prayer, in the guidance of clergy, or the general opinion of
mankind, I warn such that they will discover, sooner or later, that
there is yet something for them to learn of morals, of the human mind,
and of God’s discipline of humanity.
There is no point of which I am more sure than that it is unwise in sick
people to keep a diary. Some suppose this task to be one of the duties
of the sick-room; whereas I am confident that it is one of the most
dangerous of snares. The traveller, moving from scene to scene in high
health and spirits, keeps a diary; he looks at it a few years after, and
can scarcely believe his own eyes when he sees how many entries there
are of his hunger, thirst, and sleepiness. He searches anxiously for a
record of some fact, important to the determination of a truth in
science--some fact of which he has a vague impression; he cannot find
it, but finds in its stead that he was chilly on that morning, or went
to bed hungry that night. If it be so in his case, how should the
journal of a sick-room avoid becoming a register of the changes of a
morbid state? Not only this; but it can scarcely contain anything
better. The experiencing and recording instruments themselves, the mind
and body, are in a morbid condition, and cannot be trusted to perceive
and record faithfully. Moreover, our tendency is, at the best, to an
intense and growing self-consciousness, and our efforts should,
therefore, be directed to having our minds called out of themselves--to
causing our days to pass away as little marked as possible. A diary of
public events, a register of books read, or of the opinions of those
whose opinions are valuable on the great questions of the time, may be
more or less amusing and profitable to keep; but then the rule should be
absolute to exclude all mention of ourselves: and my own belief is, that
it is wisest to avoid the temptation altogether--to keep clear of all
bondage to ourselves and to habit that can be declined.
I was unutterably moved, lately, by the reading of a diary, preserved in
MS., of one of the most innocent, holy, and devoted of God’s human
children; a creature who entered upon life endowed with good gifts,
spiritual, intellectual, and external, and who wasted away in body,
dwindled away in mind, and sank early to the grave, clearly through the
force given by superstition to a corroding self-consciousness, to which
she was by constitution liable. Her diary yields clear lessons which
might profitably be made known, but that they are not apparently
recognised by those who had the charge of herself in life, and hold her
papers now. Among these lessons, one is to our present purpose. Her
diary became more and more a register of frames and feelings, each mood
of which was fearfully important to herself as a token of God’s
dispositions towards her. To an eye which now reads the whole at once,
side by side with the dates and incidents of her life, nothing can be
clearer than that the risings and fallings of her spiritual state
exactly corresponded with the condition of her health. In one portion,
the record becomes almost too painful to be borne. While her days were
passed in heavenly deeds, and her solitude in prayer, she sinks daily
lower and lower in hope and cheer: and at last, after a record of most
mournful humiliation, we find a notice which explains all--of the
breaking of a blood-vessel. To us it is nothing strange to experience
fluctuations of more than spirits--of heart and soul, and to ascertain,
after a time, that they were owing to physical causes. We even
anticipate these changes, and know that when we awake in the morning, we
shall be harassed by such and such a thought; that at such an hour of
the day we shall suffer under remorse for such and such an old act and
word, or under fear of the consequences of conduct which, at other
seasons, we know to be right. We have that to tell of ourselves, which
seems as a key to the mournful diary I have mentioned. This experience,
and such warnings as that which has so deeply moved me, should teach us
the wisdom and duty of not cherishing--by recording--our personal cares,
but rather of “casting them upon Him who careth for us.” The most
fitting sick-room aspiration is to attain to a trusting carelessness as
to what becomes of our poor dear selves, while we become more and more
engrossed by the vast interests which our Father is conducting within
our view, from the birdie which builds under our eaves, to the gradual
gathering of the nations towards the fold of Christ, on the everlasting
hills.
SOME GAINS AND SWEETS OF INVALIDISM.
“God Almighty!
There is a soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out!”
SHAKSPERE.
“Yet have they special pleasures, even mirth,
By those undreamt of who have only trod
Life’s valley smooth; and if the rolling earth
To their nice ear have many a painful tone,
They know man does not live by joy alone,
But by the presence of the power of God.”
MILNES.
“But here we are;--that is a great fact; and, if we tarry a little,
we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself
is here; and art and nature, hope and dread, friends, angels, and
the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou
sittest.”
EMERSON.
It is harder to be brief about our gains and privileges than about our
peculiar troubles: but I must try to be so; for the discoveries we make,
though to us all glowing with freshness and beauty, are, to those who
merely receive them, as trite as any old moralities whatever.
One great and strange blessing to us is, the abolition of the future--of
our own future in this life.
It is commonly thought a chief privilege of childhood, that it is passed
without thought of the future--that the present is all in all. I doubt
the truth of this. My own experience in childhood was of a painful and
incessant longing for the future--a longing which enhanced all its
innumerable pains, and embittered many of its pleasures--a longing for
strength of body and of mind, for independence of action--for an escape,
in short, from the conditions of childhood. The privilege which I then
missed I have found now. Let it be a comfort to all sorrowing friends of
those who are under any sort of doom without an assigned period to know,
that in such cases the sense of doom vanishes. When the future becomes a
blank to us, it becomes presently invisible. And when we sustain this
change we do not contract in our desires and interests, but, I humbly
hope, the contrary. The thoughts which stretched forwards, with
eagerness and anxiety, now spread themselves abroad, more calmly and
with more disinterestedness. There is danger of our losing sympathy with
the young, the healthy, the ambitious; for we soon require to be
reminded of those states of mind, and those classes of interests which
involve ambition, or any kind of personal regard to the future: but, if
we can preserve these sympathies, it does appear to me that the change
is, to ourselves, pure gain. The image of five, ten, twenty years of our
present life, or decline into deeper suffering, ending in death, makes
absolutely no impression upon us. We have not the slightest movement of
a wish that it were otherwise;--we do not turn our heads half round to
see if there be no way of escape: and this is because our interests are
all occupied with immediate and pressing objects, in which we have
ascertained our true life to consist. Of these objects we would not
surrender one for the permission to go back to the most brilliant point
of our lives. Wealth would be a trouble to us--a responsibility we would
rather decline; and it is astonishing to us that any man can wish for
more than is needed to furnish his children well for the probation of
life. Ambition and its objects (of course, not including usefulness)
appear to us so much voluntarily incurred bondage and fatigue.
Subjection to the opinions of men--a dependence on their suffrages for
any heartfelt object--seems a slavery so humbling and so unnecessary,
that we could hardly wonder sufficiently at it, but for the recollection
that all human desires and passions are the instruments by which the
work of the race is done, and that ambition is far from being among the
lowest of these instruments. Those of us who had known formerly, for a
sufficient length of time, what it was to have fame, did not need to be
laid by to discover how soon and how thoroughly it becomes disregarded
(except for its collateral privileges), and left behind among our
forgotten objects of desire: but our present position is the best for
following out its true history--for tracing that path a reach beyond the
point where moralists commonly leave it. The young aspirant is warned
betimes, without practical effect, that the privileges of obscurity are
irrecoverable: that, when he has become famous, he may long in vain for
the quiet shelter of privacy, that he has left. He feels this, with a
sense of panic, when he has gained the celebrity he longs for, and is
undergoing his first agonies from adverse opinion. If he would but
believe us, we watchers could tell him that, though he can never retreat
into his original privacy, there is a yet more complete shelter before
him, if he does not linger, or take up his rest short of his journey’s
end. This shelter is not to be found in indifference, in contempt for
human opinion--that ugly mask behind which some strive to hide the
workings of an agonised countenance, while the scorchings of scorn beat
fiercely on their brains, and the jeerings of ridicule torture their
ears. There is no rest, no shelter, in contempt: and human opinion can
never be naturally despised, though it has no claim to any man’s
allegiance. The true and welcome ultimate shelter of the celebrated is
in great interests--great objects. If they use the power their fame puts
into their hands for the furtherance of any of the great ends for which
Providence is operating, they find themselves by degrees in possession
once more of the external freedom, the internal quiet, the genuine
privacy of soul, which they believed forfeited for ever, while the
consciousness of the gaze of the world was upon them. They read what is
said of themselves in print just as if it was said of any other person,
if it be laudatory; and with a quieter feeling still if it be adverse,
as I shall presently describe.
It is sometimes said, that it is a pity when great men do not happen to
die on the completion of the one grand achievement of their lives,
instead of taming down the effect by living on afterwards like common
men;--that Clarkson should have died on the abolition of the
slave-trade,--Howard after his first or second journey,--Scott on the
publication of his best romance,--and so on. But there is a
melo-dramatic air about such a wish, which appears childish to moral
speculators. We are glad to have Clarkson still, to honour freshly in
his old age. We see more glory about the head of John Quincy Adams
contending, as a Representative in Congress, for popular rights, than he
ever wore as President of the United States. We should be glad that
Rowland Hill should live and work as a common man for a quarter of a
century after the complete realisation of his magnificent boon to
society. In truth, we behold great men entering early upon their heaven,
when we see them tranquilly retired, or engaged in common labours, after
their most memorable task is accomplished. The worthiest of celebrated
men would, I believe, be found, if their meditations could be read,
anticipating with the highest satisfaction, as the happiest part of
their prospect beyond the grave, their finding a level condition once
more--being encompassed by equals--or, as the popular preacher puts it,
starting fair from the new post. Such being the natural desire of
simple hearts, there is a pleasure to spectators in seeing them, while
still here, encompassed with fellowship--not set above, nor apart,
though enjoying the natural recompenses of their deeds.
The words “natural recompenses” remind me of another gain conferred on
us by our condition--scarcely separable, perhaps, from those I have
mentioned--from the extinction of all concern about our future in this
world, and the ordinary objects of pursuit; but yet to us so
conspicuous, so heartfelt, as to demand record as a blessing by itself.
I mean the conviction of the hollowness of all talk of _reward_ for
conduct;--the conviction of the essential blessedness of goodness. What
can appear more trite? Where is the church or chapel in which it is not
preached every Sunday? Yet we, who heard and believed through all the
Sundays and week-days of many years, seem but now to have _known_ this
truth. Our knowledge is now tested by the indifference with which we
behold men struggling for other objects, under a sort of insanity, as it
appears to us, while the interests which animate us to sympathy are
those of the pure in heart, seeing God before they die; and the dread
which chills our souls is for the multitude who live in passion and die
in moral insensibility. To us it appears so obviously the supreme good
to have a healthy soul serenely reposing in innocence, and spontaneously
working for God and man, that all divergence of aims from this end seems
madness, and all imagery of rewards for moral desert the most profane of
mockeries. It is a matter of wonder to us, that we ever conceived of
royalty otherwise than as a title to compassion; of hereditary honours,
as desirable; of fame, as an end; and we are apt to wonder at others, in
their turn, that they do not perceive the most blessed of our race to be
the moral reformers of each age, passing “from strength to strength,”
although wearing out in their enterprise, and the placid well-doers,
whether high or lowly in their service. The appendages themselves of
such a state--the esteem, honour, and love which wait upon moral
desert--almost vanish from our notice when we are contemplating the
infinite blessedness of the peace of a holy heart.
Then we have (not to dwell on a matter already spoken of) a peculiar
privilege in the peculiar loveliness which the image of Death assumes
to us. In our long leisure, all sweet and soothing associations of
rest,--of relief from anxiety and wearing thought,--of re-entrance upon
society,--(a society how sanctified!)--of the realisation of our best
conceptions of what is holy, noble, and perfect,--all affections, all
aspirations gather round the idea of Death, till it recurs at all our
best moments, and becomes an abiding thought of peace and joy. When we
hear or read of the departure of any one we knew,--of the death even of
the youngest or the most active,--a throb of congratulatory feeling is
our first emotion, rather than the shock which we used to experience,
and which we now see sustained by those around us. Reflection, or
tidings of survivors may change our view; but so does the image of Death
become naturally endeared to us, that our first spontaneous thought is
of favour to those who are selected for it. I am not recommending this
impression as rational, but intimating it as characteristic of a
peculiar condition. It is no slight privilege, however, to have that
great idea which necessarily confronts every one of us all clothed with
loveliness instead of horror, or mere mystery. Till now, we never knew
how any anticipation may be incessantly filling with sweetness.
It may be doubted whether there is a more heartfelt peace experienced at
any point of our moral progress than in the right reception of
calumnious injury. In the immediate return from the first recoil into
the mood of forgiveness, there is something heavenly even to the novice.
In the compassion for one’s calumniator there is pain; and it is a pain
which increases with experience of life, and with our insight into the
peril and misery of an unjust and malicious habit of mind; but in the
act of pitying forgiveness, there is a solace so sweet as to make one
wonder how long men will be in adopting this remedy for their injuries.
Any one who has been ambitious, and with success, will, if he be wise,
be ready to declare that not the first breath of fame was to him so
sweet as the first emotions of forgiveness, the first stirrings of the
love of enemies, after his earliest experience of the calumny by which
all public effort is sure to be assailed. I am not supposing cowardly
acquiescence in insult and injury. I am supposing the due self-assertion
made, or defence found not to be practicable. This is all that others
have to do with. A man’s self-communion on the matter is his own
private affair: and little know the systematic calumniators, who for
party’s or prejudice’s sake, assail those who can only return silence,
how they really work in some hearts they seek to wound. In some they may
excite rage or bitter anguish; but there are others,--probably many,--in
which they cause no severer pain than a pitying sorrow for themselves,
while they kindle a glow of courage, patience, and benignity,--they
cause a more exquisite mingling of sweet emotions,--than were ever
aroused by praise. The more defenceless the injured, the more private
and the more heavenly are these passages of his soul; and none are more
defenceless than sick prisoners. If subject to such injuries in the
world, where they could by their presence perpetually live down false
aspersions, (aspersions on their opinions as well as on their conduct,)
helpless indeed are they when living out of sight, dumb in regard to
society and through the press. Then, if their party foes take the
opportunity to assail and misrepresent their opinions and their acts,
those foes can have all their own way abroad in the world; but the very
air of our sick-room turns them from foes into best friends. After one
moment’s sickening at the poor malice and cowardice, our thoughts fix on
the high and holy truths to which they direct us,--on the transience of
error,--the nothingness of fame, in the serious passages of life,--the
powerlessness of assaults from without while we possess ourselves,--till
we end in a calm and sweet mood of contentedness for ourselves and
affectionate intercession for the victims of angry passion or of sordid
interests. It does not move us painfully to think of our
helplessness,--to contemplate leaving life without explaining our
opinions, or justifying our views and enterprises. What is just and true
will abide and prevail; and as for our claims to a share in the
reputation, they seem in the sick-room worthy of only a smile. If we
wrought for reputation, we must suffer, sooner or later, for the lowness
of the aim; and now may be our time for taking a new growth through
pain. But if we wrought for truth and good, we are not susceptible of
the venom of the party slanderer. His sting proves no sting, but a
beneficial touch rousing in us many tender, and resolute, and benignant
feelings. These may be awakened wherever such a touch reaches us; but
nowhere perhaps so sensibly as in the privacy and lowliness of the
sick-room. I need say nothing of the benefit brought to us, by the same
act, in the sympathy of generous minds. Of the blessing of sympathy I
have already said so much that I dare scarcely approach the subject
again. And never, as all know, does ministering affection so abound as
towards the injured. When injury and helplessness unite their claims,
there is no end to the multitude of hearts that throng to defend and
aid. They are far more than are needed; for few--extremely few--are
those who venture or who like to send the enmity of public life into the
retreats of privacy. Very rare, I believe, is the species of men who
insult when all the world knows there can be no reply. Still, such cases
are witnessed; and of their operation I have spoken.
The greater number of invalids are under no such liability; but all may
be subject to some injustice,--some misrepresentation which may reach
their knowledge; and their emotions, both of recoil and of renovation,
may be like in kind, and even equal in degree, to those I have
intimated. If occasions for forgiveness should arise,--(and to whom do
they not?)--may its relish be as sweet to them as it assuredly is to
some more extensively tried!
An inestimable gain from the longest sickness is the outgrowth of the
scruples and other conflicts which constitute the chief evil of merely
long sickness. Of some perils and pains of our condition I have spoken,
and I must therefore declare that there is a remedial influence in the
very infirmity which appeared to create them. If it be but continued
long enough,--if the struggle be not broken off before it is fairly
exhausted,--victory will declare itself on the side of peace. We may be
long in passing through the experience of weakness, humiliation and
submission; but up, through acquiescence, we must rise, sooner or
later,--true things separating themselves infallibly from the transient,
and all that is important revealing itself in its due proportions, till
our vision is cleared and our hearts are at rest. If the invalid of five
years can smile at some of the anxieties and scrupulosities of his first
season of retreat, much more clear-sighted must the ten years’ thinker
be in regard to the snares and troubles of his early or midway term. If,
amidst the gain, as little as possible be lost, the privileges of our
state may be such,--not as, indeed, to compare with those of health and
a natural mode of life,--but as may satisfy a humble and rational hope
that our season of probation is not lost, nor materially wasted.
* * * * *
The sick-room is a sanctuary of confidence. It is a natural
confessional, where the spontaneous revelations are perhaps as ample as
any enforced disclosures from disciple to priest, and without any of the
mischiefs of enforcement. We may be excluded from much observation of
the outer life of men; but of the inner life, which originates and
interprets the outer, it is scarcely possible that in any other
circumstances we could have known so much. Into what depths of opinion
are we not let down! To what soaring heights of speculation are we not
borne up! What is there of joy or sorrow, of mystery and marvel, in
human experience that is not communicated to us! And all this not as if
read in print,--not half-revealed, in the form of hints to such as can
understand,--not in general terms, as addressed to the general,--but
spoken fully and freely, with that particularity which fastens words
upon the soul for ever,--with those living tones of emotion which make
the hearer a partner in all that is and has been felt. Here, we learn
that the whole experience of humanity may be contained in one bosom,
through such participation as we ourselves entertain; and even that all
opinions, the most various and the most incompatible, may be deposited
in one intellect, for gradual review, without inducing scepticism, and
possibly to the strengthening of the powers and privileges of Faith.
Göthe, the seer of humanity, formed in himself the habit of agreeing
with all the opinions uttered to him, alleging as his ground that there
is always a sense in which everything is true, and that it is a good to
encourage, and an evil to discourage, any belief arrived at in natural
course. There are men with minds of a far lower order, but still
somewhat superior to the average, who do precisely the reverse,--they
see far enough to be aware that there is always something to be said to
the contrary of what they hear uttered; and they cannot help saying it.
They fall into a habit of invariable opposition, justifying the practice
to themselves by the plea of impartiality,--of resistance to
dogmatism,--of love of truth, and the like. I disapprove of both habits.
Both practically injure belief, and damage the interests of truth. The
natural operation of Göthe’s method was to encourage in many indolence
in the pursuit of truth and carelessness about opinions;--in some,
doubts of the very existence of truth; and in all reflective persons, a
keen sense of the insult conveyed, however unintentionally, by such
treatment. Far worse, however, is the influence of the antagonist order
of minds,--not only from their comparative numbers, for there is not a
Göthe in five hundred years,--but from the direct operation of their
method and their example. A man who forms a habit of intellectual
antagonism destroys more than can ever be repaired, both in his own mind
and in those which he influences. He allows no rest in any supposition
even to those who have not power or leisure to follow out the research.
He cuts their own ground from under them, and does not establish them on
any other, for he himself appears to be established on none. Men of this
order are, above all others, fickle in their opinions. Complacently
supposing themselves impartial investigators into truth, they are, in
fact, the sport of any one who, discerning and playing with their
weakness, can put them up to the assertion and defence of any opinions
whatever, and lead them into daily self-contradiction. What ensues is
seen at a glance:--they tamper with truth till the structure of their
own intellect becomes fatally impaired:--they denounce, as bigots, all
men of every order of mind who remain steady in any opinions, and
especially such as continue to hold opinions which they have themselves
quitted:--they never doubt of their own fluctuations being progression,
and that they are leaving all stable believers behind:--they learn no
caution in the publication of their so-called opinions from their own
incessant changes, but rather pique themselves on their eagerness to
exhibit and insist upon each new view, and enjoy the occasion it affords
for complacent amazement at all who hold the positions which they have
themselves abandoned.
It may be said, that such men lose their influence, and with it their
power for mischief. It is true that, by degrees, more and more decline
argument with them, and they cease to have any convincing power, because
it is seen that they themselves do not rest in permanent convictions;
but their disturbing power remains. They can destroy, though they cannot
build up. They can unsettle minds which yet they cannot lead. They can
distress and perplex the humble and narrowly-informed;--they can
startle, not only the slothful, (who will turn to sleep again, on the
plea of the foible of the awakener) but the nervous and feeble who need
repose; and, worse than all, they can irreparably injure the young, by
spreading before them wide fields of inquiry, and then hunting them out
of every corner in which they would be disposed to stay, and rest, and
think. Men of this kind of mind have a certain power of sympathy with
every species of opinion; and this good and attractive quality it is
which mainly causes their self-deception, and aggravates their power of
injury. They mistake it for candour, at the very moment that they
overflow with intolerance towards holders of opinions which they have
relinquished. The result in such cases is always the same,--intellectual
ruin, throughout the department of the understanding, however eminent
the dialectical powers may appear, through the constant practice which
has increased their original strength; and with the intellectual damage
must be combined great moral injury. Göthe’s method appears to be
dangerous; but the opposite one is fatal.
To us, the depositories of vast confidences on these matters, it appears
that there is no manner of necessity for either practice. We can avouch,
from what we witness, that there may be sympathy with every order of
understanding and every phase of opinion, without either hypocrisy, or
tendency to disputation, or a surrender of differing views. We see how
there may be an intrepid and continuous avowal of opinions, without
disturbance to the unlearned and the feeble. We can fully agree with
Göthe as to the unequalled mischief of endangering belief in that vast
majority of minds which have other work to do than to investigate
matters of opinion, without seeing it to be at all necessary to
countenance what we know or believe to be error. We can fully agree with
his practical antagonists as to the nobleness of candour, and the evils
which ensue from dogmatism; while, at the same time, we would sooner die
than dare to tempt one intellect to follow us, after one self-conviction
of such an instability as theirs. Where there is a habit of mutability,
there is intellectual infirmity, as is shown, with indescribable
clearness, to us gazers into the mirror of events. It is a singular
privilege granted to us, to witness the workings of the best method,--of
that “simplicity and godly sincerity” which is unconsciously adopted by
the wise to whom Truth is neither the spirit of rashness, nor “of fear,
but of power and of love, and of a sound mind.”
It has occurred to me, at times, that a second volume,--“On the
Formation and Publication of Opinions,”--less popularly useful perhaps
than the existing one, but deeper and more comprehensive, might be an
invaluable gift from the hands of some one in a retreat, (in a sick
retreat, as illness invites confidence,)--from the hands of some one who
would know how to use with equal discretion and intrepidity his singular
opportunities.
One of our most valuable discoveries is often made elsewhere, but is not
sufficiently acknowledged and acted upon. We find, after a trial of many
methods, that we learn to endure and achieve less by direct effort than
by putting ourselves under influences favourable to the state of mind
we seek. We have discovered the same thing before, in regard to mending
our faults. We have found that childhood and youth were the seasons of
resolution, and that, perhaps, we have not since cured ourselves of a
single fault by direct effort. I am persuaded that instances are
extremely rare of rectification by such means. I have myself amended
only one bad habit--and that a very trifling one--by express effort,
since I was twenty; and I could point out only two or three, of all my
acquaintance, that I know to be capable of self-improvement in that
direct manner; and I cannot but honour them in proportion to my sense of
the difficulty and rarity of this exercise of moral power. Yet, how
people go on expecting reformation in sinners from a mere conviction of
the reason actuating the will, as they suppose, infallibly! the
consequence of which foolish expectation is, that the true appliances
are neglected. Wordsworth has it--
“‘Resolve!’ the haughty moralist would say:
‘This single act is all that we demand.’
Alas! such wisdom bids a creature fly,
Whose very sorrow is that Time hath shorn
His natural wings!”
Instead of losing time, and practically invoking despair, by exhorting
to impossible flights, wise guardians will rather remove the sufferer
into an element of new enterprise, or one which may gradually exhaust
and destroy his parasitical foes of habit. We sufferers experimentally
ascertain this very soon. We find how little reason we have to trust to
efforts of resolution under circumstances which tend to enfeeble
resolution. We might be capable, as so many others are, of any amount of
effort on a single emergency; but when we have to deal with a permanent
infliction--to make the best of a difficult mode of life--we find that
we must put our trust in abiding influences, and not in a succession of
efforts. We therefore lay aside defiance; we submit ourselves--not to
our troubles--but to every kind of natural preventive, remedy, and
solace. We arrange our personal habits so as to husband our ease, and to
conceal our pain; and we place our minds under such influences,
intellectual and spiritual, as may best nourish our higher powers, and
occupy our energies, to the alleviation, if it may not be to the
exclusion, of the suffering, whose challenge we will neither entertain
nor defy.
Among other merits of this method, may be reckoned this--that it helps
to introduce us to a privilege which may be disregarded by many, but
which to us is inestimable--that of causing pleasure, rather than pain,
to those connected with us. It is the prerogative of the healthy and
happy to give pleasure wherever they go; it is the worst humiliation and
grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering. To the far-seeing
invalid, who is aware not only of this immediate effect, but of its
remote consequences, this is the most afflicting feature of his
condition. If we can, by any management, evade this liability, we have
cause to be grateful indeed. If, by submitting ourselves to all
softening and ennobling influences, we can so nourish and educe the
immortal part of ourselves as to subdue our own conflicts, and present
our active and enjoying aspect to those who visit us, we are absolved
from the worst penalties of our state. If, as years pass on, we find
ourselves sought from the impulse of inclination, as well as from the
stringency of duty--if we are permitted to see faces light up from ours,
and hear the music of mirth succeed to the low serious tones of
sympathetic greeting--we may let our hearts bound with the assurance
that all is well with us. When we cannot refuse to see that children
come to us eagerly, and that our riper companions stay late by our sofa,
and come again and again, till nothing short of duty calls them away,
any one might envy us the feelings with which we lie down again in our
solitude. We are not proud, like the young beauty with her conquest over
hearts, or like the political or literary hero with his sway over the
passions or the reason; but we are elate--and not without cause--elate
in our privilege of annihilating the constraint and distaste inspired by
our condition, and of finding ourselves restored to something like an
equality of intercourse with the healthy in soul. The best and highest
must ever be selected from among the healthy and the happy--from among
those whose conditions of being are the most perfectly fulfilled; but,
without aspiring to their consummate privileges, we feel ourselves
abundantly blessed in such a partial emancipation as permits us, on
occasion, and without shame, to join their “glorious company.”
THE END.
LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
* * * * *
_April, 1844_
MR. MOXON
HAS RECENTLY PUBLISHED:--
I.
HAYDN’S DICTIONARY OF DATES, and UNIVERSAL REFERENCE, relating to
all Ages and Nations; comprehending every Remarkable Occurrence,
Ancient and Modern--the Foundation, Laws, and Governments of
Countries--their Progress in Civilisation, Industry, and
Science--their Achievements in Arms; the Political and Social
Transactions of the British Empire--its Civil, Military, and
Religious Institutions--the Origin and Advance of Human Arts and
Inventions, with copious details of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
The whole comprehending a body of information, Classical,
Political, and Domestic, from the earliest accounts to the present
time. A NEW EDITION. In one volume, 8vo, price 18_s._ cloth.
II.
KNOWLES’S (JAMES) PRONOUNCING AND EXPLANATORY DICTIONARY OF THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Founded on a correct development of the Nature,
the Number, and the Various Properties of all its Simple and
Compound Sounds, as combined into Syllables and Words. FOURTH
EDITION. In royal 8vo, price 12_s._ cloth.
III.
By the AUTHOR OF “TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST.”
DANA’S SEAMAN’S MANUAL; containing a Treatise on Practical
Seamanship, with Plates; a Dictionary of Sea Terms; Customs and
Usages of the Merchant Service; Laws relating to the Practical
Duties of Master and Mariners. SECOND EDITION. Price 5_s._ cloth.
IV.
HINTS ON HORSEMANSHIP, to a NEPHEW and NIECE; or, Common Sense and
Common-Errors in Common Riding. By Colonel GEORGE GREENWOOD, late
of the Second Life Guards. Price 2_s._ 6_d._
V.
CICERO’S LIFE AND LETTERS. The Life by Dr. MIDDLETON; The Letters
translated by WM. MELMOTH and Dr. HEBERDEN. In one volume, 8vo,
with Portrait and Vignette, price 16_s._ cloth.
ADVERTISEMENTS.
VI.
KNOWLES’S DRAMATIC WORKS. In three volumes, post 8vo, price 21_s._
cloth.
VII.
CAPTAIN BASIL HALL’S FRAGMENTS OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. A NEW
EDITION. In one volume, 8vo, price 12_s._ cloth.
VIII.
DEERBROOK. A NOVEL. By HARRIET MARTINEAU. A NEW EDITION. In one
pocket volume, price 6_s._ cloth.
IX.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. A Historical Romance. By HARRIET MARTINEAU. A
NEW EDITION. In one pocket volume, price 6_s._ cloth.
X.
JARVES’S HISTORY OF THE SANDWICH ISLANDS; their Antiquities,
Mythology, Legends, Discovery by Europeans in the Sixteenth
Century, Re-discovery by COOK; with their Civil, Religious, and
Political History, from the earliest Traditionary Period to the
Present Time. In one volume, price 6_s._ cloth.
XI.
SHARPE’S EGYPT UNDER THE ROMANS. In 8vo, price 7_s._ boards.
XII.
LIFE IN THE SICK-ROOM: ESSAYS. By AN INVALID. SECOND EDITION. Post
8vo. Price 8_s._ boards.
XIII.
LAMONT’S IMPRESSIONS, THOUGHTS, and SKETCHES, during Two Years in
France and Switzerland. Foolscap 8vo. Price 6_s._ boards.
XIV.
JARVES’S SCENES AND SCENERY IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS, and a trip
through Central America. Price 8_s._ cloth.
Bradbury and Evans, Printers, Whitefriars.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE IN THE SICK-ROOM ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
