But around us there are others who have composedly accepted sorrow as their portion.  We have, it may be, felt so much joy in living, we have been so pierced through and through in every nerve and every faculty of the mind with pure rapture during our pilgrimage, that we would fain let all dwellers on earth share the blessedness that we have known.  It is not to be; the gospel of pity must needs claim some of its disciples wholly—­and sorrow is their portion.  Perhaps under all their sadness there lurks a joy that passes all known to slighter souls—­I hope so; I hope that they cannot be permitted to endure what Dante endured.  In the purlieus of our cities these resigned, resolute spirits expend their forces, and their unostentatious figures, passing from home to home where poor men lie, offer a lesson to the petty souls of some whose riches and worldly powers are by no means petty.  Ah, it is lovely to see those merciful sisters of the fallen or falling—­good to see the men who help them!  Need we pity them?  They would say “No”; but we must, for they live hard.  A delicate lady quietly sets to work in a filthy tenement; her white hands raise up and cleanse the foulest of the poor little infants who swarm in the slums; she calmly performs menial offices for the basest and most ungrateful of the poor—­and no one who has not lived among those degraded folk can tell what ingratitude is really like.  Day after day that lady toils; and the only word of thanks she receives is perhaps a whine from some woman who wishes to cajole her into bestowing some gift.  These sisters of Sorrow do not need thanks any more than they need pity; they frankly recognise the baseness of ill-reared human nature, and they go on trustfully in the hope that maybe things may grow slowly better.  They meet death calmly; they hide their own sorrow, and even their pity is disciplined into usefulness.  The men of the good company are the same.  They have resigned all the lighter joys of earth, they are calm, and they let the unutterable sadness of the world spur them on only to quiet efforts after righteousness.  Think what it must be for a man to leave the warm encompassment of the cheerful day and pass composedly to a gloom which is relieved only by the inner light that shines from the soul!  Were not the hearts of the heroes pure, they must grow cynical as they looked on the evil mass of roguery, idleness, foulness, and cunning that seethes around them.  But they have passed the portal beyond which peace is found; and the sorrow wherewith they gaze on their hapless fellow-men is tinctured neither by scorn nor weariness.  If there is no reward for them, then we all of us have cause for bitter disappointment.  But the forlorn hope of goodness never trouble themselves about rewards; they face the shadows of doom only as they face the squalor of their daily martyrdom.  A certain philosopher said that he could not endure so sombre an existence because his nerves and sinews were frail and the pain would have mastered him; but he gladly owned that the enthusiasts had conquered his admiration and taken it for their permanent possession.  The cool keen eye of the scoffer divined the strength of sorrow, and he admired the men whom he durst not imitate.