what gives one, like the rich fool, the sense of false
security of goods stored up for the years? We
are set in life to feel insecure, or at all events
to gain stability and security of soul, not to prop
up our failing and timid senses upon the pillows of
wealth and ease and circumstance. The man whom
I entirely envy is the man who walks into the dark
valley of misfortune or sickness or grief, or the
shadow of death, with a curious and inexpressible zest
for facing and interrogating the presences that haunt
the place. For a man who does this, his memory
is not like a land where he loves to linger upon the
sunlit ridges of happy recollection, but a land where
in reflection he threads in backward thought the dark
vale, the miry road, the craggy rift up which he painfully
climbed; the optimism that hurries with averted glance
past the shadow is as false as the pessimism that
hurries timidly across the bright and flowery meadow.
The more we realise the immutability of our lot, the
more grateful we become for our pains as well as for
our delights. If we have still lives to live
and regions to traverse, after our eyes close upon
the world, those lives and those regions may be, as
we love to think, tracts of serener happiness and
more equable tranquillity. But if they be still
a mixture, such as we here endure, of pain and pleasure,
then our aim ought to be at all costs to learn the
lesson of endurance; or rather, if we hold firmly
to the sense of law, minute, pervading, unalterable
law, to welcome every step we make in the direction
of courage and hopefulness. In the midst of atrocious
sorrow and suffering there is no sense so blessed
as the sense that dawns upon the suffering heart that
it can indeed endure what it had represented to itself
as unendurable, and that however sharply it suffers,
there is still an inalienable residue of force and
vitality which cannot be exhausted.
IV
Such a perfect day: the sky cloudless; sunlight
like pale gold or amber; soft mists in the distance;
a delicate air, gently stirred, fresh, with no poisonous
nip in it. I knew last night it would be fine,
for the gale had blown itself out, and when I came
in at sunset the chimneys and shoulders of the Hall
stood out dark against the orange glow. The beloved
house seemed to welcome me back, and as I came across
the footpath, through the pasture, I saw in the brightly-lighted
kitchen the hands of some one whose face I could not
see, in the golden circle of lamplight, deftly moving,
preparing something, for my use perhaps.
Yet for all that I am ill at ease; and as I walked
to-day, far and fast in the sun-warmed lanes, my thoughts
came yapping and growling round me like a pack of
curs—undignified, troublesome, vexatious
thoughts; I chase them away for a moment, and next
moment they are snapping at my heels. Experiences
of a tragic quality, however depressing they may be,
have a vaguely sustaining power about them, when they
close in, as the fat bulls of Bashan closed in upon
the Psalmist. There is no escape then, and the
matter is in the hands of God; but when many dogs have
come about one, one feels that one must try to deal
with the situation oneself; and that is just what
one does not want to do.