eave us, they will not leave us
the men we were. Once, at a public meeting, I heard a man in eminent
station make a speech. I had never seen him before; but I remembered an
inscription which I had read, in a certain churchyard far away, upon the
stone that marked the resting-place of his young wife, who had died many
years before. I thought of its simple words of manly and hearty sorrow.
I knew that the eminence he had reached had not come till she who would
have been proudest of it was beyond knowing it or caring for it. And I
cannot say with what interest and satisfaction I thought I could trace,
in the features which were sad without the infusion of a grain of
sentimentalism, in the subdued and quiet tone of the man's whole aspect
and manner and address, the manifest proof that he had not shut down the
leaf upon that old page of his history, that he had never quite got over
that great grief of earlier years. One felt better and more hopeful for
the sight. I suppose many people, after meeting some overwhelming loss
or trial, have fancied that they would soon die; but that is almost
invariably a delusion. Various dogs have died of a broken heart, but
very few human beings. The Inferior creature has pined away at his
master's loss: as for _us_, it is not that one would doubt the depth
and sincerity of sorrow, but that there is more endurance in our
constitution, and that God has appointed that grief shall rather mould
and influence than kill. It is a much sadder sight than an early death,
to see human beings live on after heavy trial, and sink into something
very unlike their early selves and very inferior to their early selves.
I can well believe that many a human being, if he could have a glimpse
in innocent youth of what he will be twenty or thirty years after, would
pray in anguish to be taken before coming to _that!_ Mansie Wauch's
glimpse of destitution was bad enough; but a million times worse is a
glimpse of hardened and unabashed sin and shame. And it would be no
comfort--it would be an aggravation in that view--to think that by the
time you have reached that miserable point, you will have grown pretty
well reconciled to it. _That_ is the worst of all. To be wicked and
depraved, and to feel it, and to be wretched under it, is bad enough;
but it is a great deal worse to have fallen into that depth of moral
degradation and to feel that really you don't care. The instinct of
accommodation is not always a blessing. I