with vehemence of fervid protest against the, to him, inexpressibly painful, monstrous, and horrible thought of an annihilating death, of an eternal grave, and mainly for the sake of one beloved and departed, whom to have lost for ever was to be for ever most miserable. Let the believer in annihilation, said he, place before him, instead of a life of sixty years, one of sixty minutes; then let him look upon the face of a beloved being, or upon a noble and wise man, as upon an aimless hour-long appearance, apparition, phantasm; as a thin shadow that melts into light and leaves no trace; can he bear the thought of it? "No! The supposition of imperishableness is always with him. Else there would hang always before his soul, as before Mahomet's in the fairest sky, a black cloud; and as Cain upon the earth, an eternal fear would pursue him." “I can bear no annihilation but my own," one of Richter's characters, like Mrs. Jameson, is fain to own. As to Richter himself, we can fancy him ready to exclaim with John Sterling, 66 Oh, rather bear beyond the date of stars

All torments heap'd that nerve and soul can feel,
Than but one hour believe destruction mars
Without a hope the life our breasts reveal."

If there be no future, and the aims of life with old age become shorter and shorter, well may there be no heart for effort and no eye for beauty, and well may love, as James Martineau has somewhere put it, "gather itself up to die." But open perfection to its veneration and immortality to its step, and "the proximity to death will quicken instead of withering the mind;" the eye will grow dim on the open page of knowledge; the hand will be found clasping in death the instruments of human good; the heart's last pulse will beat with some new emotion of benignity." So Jules Simon, again, in his treatise on Le Devoir: "L'inévitable mort ne change-t-elle pas pour nous de caractère quand, au lieu d'apporter avec elle le néant, elle ne paraît plus que le commencement d'une existence nouvelle? Qu'y a-t-il de si puissants dans ces pensées d'immortalité qui nous soutiennent dans l'agoine et nous consolent de mourir?... Ne sentonsnous pas l'immense bonheur de ne pas tomber dans le néant?

d'échapper à cette destruction de notre être, de sauver notre pensée notre conscience, notre cœur, tout ce moi qui nous est si cher, et d'entrer en possession de la vie réelle, après cet usufruit de la vie terrestre ?" Reflecting on a certain type of morbid indifference to life, and professed longing for death, Charlotte Brontè muses that God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die: she believed, in her heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. If we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened, it is not that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, ἵνα καταποθῇ τὸ θνητὸν ὑπὸ τῆς (wns,—that death may be swallowed up of life.

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,

No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long'd for death.

'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that I want."

VI.

MISERY BYGONE AND FORGOTTEN.

JOB Xi. 16.

'HERE should come a day for Job, so Zophar the

THE
Tamathie was fain to hope and believe, when his

present misery, however complete and overwhelming, should have passed away, and be no more remembered. Not only should the pressure of it, but the very memory of it, be got rid of. Not only should the now downcast sufferer cease to suffer, but fail to recall what he once suffered. The blessedness of release should become twice blessed in the added boon of oblivion. His term of calamity over, it should be counted not merely among things that are not, but among those that have not been. "Because thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember

gladly forget that they belong to human existence-moments in which it would have been better to have been sleeping the sleep of death, than to have lived and suffered their anguish. They don't last long, those horrible moments," Miss Thackeray observes; "they pass on, but they leave a burning taste; it comes back again and again with the troubles of life."* Dr. Beattie used to tell how an old survivor of Lord Anson's company, in the voyage of the Centurion, "durst not recollect or think" of the sufferings they endured between Cape Horn and Juan Fernandez. And De Quincey, in his stirring narrative of the Revolt of the Tartars, records of some of the survivors, after a storm of misery so fierce, that in the end (as happened also at Athens during the Peloponnesian war, from a different form of misery) very many lost their memory; all records of their past life were wiped away as with a sponge -utterly erased and cancelled.

WH

VII.

PENT-UP, TONGUE-TIED GRIEF.

JOB xiii. 19.

HOM might Job find to plead with him? "for now," said he, "if I hold my tongue, I shall give up the ghost." Speech is sometimes the safety-valve of a great sorrow. To be tongue-tied is to have the very heart-strings tied too, and tightly tied, to heart-break point.

"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak

Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break."

* In another of her books she describes the sensations of one whose trouble had been merged in a greater trouble, and so put out of mind :the despair of a few hours before seemed like a remembrance of some old tune played out and come to an end abruptly in the midst of its most passionate cadence. The tunes of life, she adds, stop short just in the middle, and that is the most curious part of our history. "Another music sounds, mighty, sudden, and unexpected, and we leave off our song to listen to it, and when it is over some of us have forgotten the song we were singing."-Sola, §x.

Then was the psalmist comforted when he could say, "I
poured out my complaints before Him, and showed Him of
my trouble." In that craving of the heart, said Frederick
Robertson, which gives the system of the Confessional its
dangerous power, there is something far more profound than
any sneer can fathom. Besides the "yearning to be true,"
there is the desire of sympathy: the heart severed from God,
feels severed from all other hearts; goes alone, as if it had
neither part nor lot with other men; itself a shadow among
shadows. And it wants some human heart to know what it
feels.*
Aurelio assures Malfato, in one of John Ford's plays,'
that to the sorely perplexed and distressed, a friend

"Upon whose faith and confidence we may
Vent with security our grief, becomes

Ofttimes the best physician. . . . And believe,
It is an ease, Malfato, to disburthen

Our souls of secret clogs, where they may find
A rest in pity, though not in redress."

It must be a Beatrice Cenci who can, and cannot but, say, "If
I try to speak, I shall go mad," when implored by motherly
affection not to hide from it her sufferings in proud, impenetrable
grief speak she cannot, "for there are deeds which have no
form, sufferings which have no tongue." For almost any less
exceptional grief, the safer rule is to abide by the counsel of
the old man in Terence, when help is ready and practicable:
"Ne retice ne verere: crede inquam mihi :
Aut consolando aut consilio aut re juvero."

Lonely, aged, an impoverished, an embarrassed man, wrote Sir Walter Scott of himself, the day after his wife died, “deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which

*

"Thousands upon thousands of laden hearts around us are crying, Come and bear my burden with me: and observe here, the apostle says, Bear ye one another's burdens.' Nor let the priest bear the burdens of all that were most unjust. Why should the priest's heart be the common receptacle of all the crimes and wickedness of a congregation? Bear ye one another's burdens. -F. W. Robertson's Sermons, vol. ii., No. xi.

:

break the heart that must bear them alone." The very nature of all our emotions, as Dr. Thomas Brown says, will lead them to pour themselves out to some other breast; and the stronger the emotion, the more ardent is this propensity. So, again, Adam Smith exclaims, "How are the unfortunate relieved when they have found out a person to whom they can communicate the cause of their sorrow!" For upon his sympathy they seem to disburden themselves of a part of their distress; and he is not improperly said to share it with them. What though by relating their misfortunes they in some measure renew their grief? There is pleasure to them in the renewal ; for the sweetness of the sympathy more than compensates the bitterness of the sorrow. The Horatian philosophy is sound:

"Sunt verba et voces quibus hunc lenire dolorem
Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem."

So the Tennysonian Enone, mournful Enone, wandering forlorn of Paris, once her playmate on the hills, when her heart is breaking, and her eyes are dim, and she is all aweary of her life, resolves, and wisely, to give her sorrow speech,

"for it may be

That, while I speak of it, a little while

My heart may wander from its deeper woe."

Even communication on paper, by means of pen and ink, is, to some at least, in whom perhaps the cacoëthes scribendi is ingrained, a sensible relief. When Lamennais, so frequently lugubrious and lamentation-given, one day talked to Béranger about certain natures being born with a wound in the heart, Béranger suggested that authors at least, nous autres, are born with a writing-desk in the brain. And as the ink in it is from a fountain that never fails, if the pen is allowed to rest the black liquid in question overflows even to the seat of the affections. Then, said he, we see everything en noir, men and things. But only let us blacken our paper with it, and anon our spirits revive, our imagination refines, and that open wound in the heart which Lamennais talked about, closes. As with the laid-by pen of the penman, so with the tied tongue of repining