broken, blasted fame; that rekindles with vestal care
its dying fires, and like a pious mother, nurses it through weakness,
infirmity, irresolution, and despondency, back to hale strength and vigor;
that by a generous confidence in its earliest repentings, and a generous
forgiveness of its gravest faults, lends strength to its purposes and
permanence to its reform. Oh! there are such hearts all around us, still
warm and beating, though pierced through with many sorrows, goaded it may
be at once by a sense of guilt and the horrors of abandonment, yet not
dead to virtue, nay, sensitively alive to it; 'for as certain flowers open
only in the night, so often in the dark hours of a great sorrow the human
soul first opens to the light of the eternal stars.' There _are_ such
hearts buried all around us; and from their unquiet graves come up the low
wail, the stifled sob, the muttered curse, the anguished prayer, appealing
to the thoughtless brotherhood above them for a ray of light, and a breath
of the free air of heaven! Hearken, and ye shall hear the tones of an
eternal _miserere_, mingling and swelling like distant organ-peals,
drowned by the din of day-light, but re-heard in all hours of thought and
stillness, in all places of meditative retirement. Listen, and ye shall
hear soliloquies of the heart with itself, revealing pleasant memories and
hopes, and tendernesses and joys, that come up from the past in shadowy
troops, with lights and garlands--and vanish, making the darkness more
visible and solitude more hideous. Blessed, we say, for Heaven has said
it, blessed are they whose ministry of love is in that unquiet inner
world; whose sympathies intertwine themselves with its strained, snapped
fibres and ligaments; whose hand gently withdraws the barbed arrows of
outrageous fortune, and into the ragged wound pours the oil of consolation
and the balm of joy! Select, sacred, and heaven-ordained and anointed
priests and priestesses they, of a GOD of love in a world of sorrow. Not
their commission is it to declare to cowering criminals a GOD wrathful,
vindictive, and scarcely less bloody than the Druid's deity, hating with
infinite venom the unhappy violator of his laws; not theirs to deal out
curious metaphysics and cold abstractions, giving a stone for bread and an
adder for an egg to the sons of sorrow and the daughters of misfortune;
but to inspire hope in the desponding and peace in the troubled bosom; to
give light for dark