If we wish our precepts to be followed, we must avoid the extremes to which moralists and philosophers are too much inclined to press their doctrines, for they are impracticable in real life. It is useless to deny that there are evils against which the aids of reason and friendship are powerless. Let us leave him who is about to lose a being whose life is blended with his own, to groan unreproved. Time alone can enfeeble his remembrances and assuage his pain. To render man inaccessible to suffering would be to change his nature. Those austere moralists who treat our feebleness with disdain, and who would render us indifferent to the most terrible blows of destiny, would at the same time leave us no sensibility to taste pleasure. Nothing can be more absurd than the vain harangues by which common-place consolation is offered to those who mourn a wife, a child, a friend. All reasonings are ineffectual when opposed to these words, ‘I have lost the loved one. You inform me that my misfortune is without a remedy. Oh! if there were a remedy, instead of unavailing tears, I would employ it. It is precisely because there is none, that I grieve.’ ‘Your tears are useless.’ ‘Still they[59] serve to solace me.’ ‘God has done it.’ ‘True, and God has formed my heart to suffer from his blow.’ ‘Your child is happy, and knew neither the errors nor the sorrows of life.’ ‘A parent’s instinctive love inspired the desire that I might teach it to avoid both and obtain happiness.’ ‘In the course of a long career your friend gave an example of all the virtues.’ ‘It is because the loss of these virtues is irreparable to me that I must deplore his death.’[11]

The greater portion of men, I admit, exaggerating their regrets, pay a tribute of dissembled grief rather to opinion, than to nature; and cold declamation and frivolous distractions are sufficient to console them. But the orators of consolation sometimes press their lessons on hearts which are really bleeding. Let such groan at liberty, and attempt not to contradict nature. Solitude may exalt the imagination; but it also inspires consoling ideas. In the silence of its refuge the desolate mourner brings himself to a nearer communion with him he regrets. He invokes, sees, and addresses him. Grief is more ingenious than we imagine in finding consolation, and has learned to employ different remedies according as the wounds are slight or deep. Two persons have each lost a dear friend. The one studiously avoids the places where he used to meet his friend. The other repairs to his desolate haunts, and surrounding himself by monuments associated with his memory, he seeks, if I may so say, to restore him to life.

The death of a beloved wife is, perhaps, the most inconsolable of evils. Let this follow a series of other misfortunes, and it so effaces their remembrance that the sufferer feels he has not until then known real grief.[60] But if this affliction be one under which our strength is broken, let it be the only one to obtain this fatal triumph. Under all other misfortunes we may find in ourselves resources for sustaining them; and may invariably either evade or assuage them, or mitigate their bitterness by resignation.

Moralists have expatiated upon the manner in which a sage ought to contemplate the evils of life. Instead of subscribing to their trite maxims, often more imposing than practicable, I sketch a summary of my philosophy. I caution the feeble and erring beings that surround me, not to dream of unmixed happiness. I invite them to partake promptly of all innocent pleasures. The evils too often appended to them may follow. Know nothing of those which have no existence except in opinion. Struggle with courage to escape all that may be evaded. But if it become inevitable to meet them, let resignation, closing your eyes on the past, secure the repose of patient endurance when happiness exists for you no longer.

Permit me to give these ideas some development. If I may believe the most prevalent modern philosophy, tranquillity of mind is the result of organization, or temperament, and of circumstances. It is the burden of my inculcation, that it may be of our own procuring; and that we owe it still more to the masculine exercise of our reason, discipline, and mental energy, than to our temperament or condition.

We have reason to deplore that unhappy being, who, yielding to dreams of pleasure, forgets to forearm himself against a fatal awakening. The history of great political convulsions, and, more than all, that of the[61] French revolution furnishes impressive examples of this spectacle. It offers more than one instance, in the feebler sex, of persons, who seemed created only to respire happiness. To the advantages of youth, talent and beauty, were united the most exalted rank, and wealth, pleasure and power, apparently to the extent of their wishes. To the dazzling fascination, with which a brilliant crowd surrounded their inexperience, many of them united the richer domestic enjoyments of the wife and mother. In the midst of their illusions, the revolutionary shout struck their ear, like a thunderstroke. Executioners bade them ascend the scaffold.[12]

These great catastrophes, I know, are rare. But there will never cease to be sorrows, which will receive their last bitterness only in death. They are all too painful to be sustained, unless they have been wisely foreseen. Let us think of misfortune, as of certain characters, with whom our lot may one day compel us to consort.

It is novelty alone, which gives our emotions extreme keenness. Whoever has strength of character, may learn to endure anything. The red men of the American wilderness are most impressive examples of this truth. Time, however, is the most efficacious teacher of the lesson of endurance. Poussin, in his painting of Eudomidas, has delineated the human heart with fidelity. The young girl of the piece abandons herself to despair. Half stretched upon the earth, her head falls supinely on the knees of the aged mother of the dying. This mother is sitting. Her attitude announces mingled meditation and grief. Amidst her tears, we trace firmness on her visage. One of the two women is taking her first[62] lesson of misery. The other has already passed through a long apprenticeship of grief.[13]

Reflection imparts anticipated experience. It takes from misery that air of novelty, which renders it terrible. When a wise man experiences a reverse, his new position has been foreseen. He has measured the sorrows, and prepared the consolations. Into whatever scene of trial he is brought, he will show in no one the embarrassment of a stranger.

Taught to be conscious that we are feeble combatants, thrown upon an arena of strife, let us not calculate that destiny has no blows in store for us. Let us prepare for wounds, painful and slow to heal. Let us blunt the darts of misfortune in advance. The............