AND FULFILLED TOO LATE.

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had he been scraping all this dross together, and he would give it all to sit one hour by the fire, with her hand in his, and hear her say she had lived to be proud of him. "The day this epaulette was put on my shoulder in Italy, she died in Paris. Ah, how could you have the heart to do that, my old woman?" A rough way of putting the question, but with undoubted heart on the questioner's side; heart's appeal to heart; loving son's to lost mother's.

When the late Mr. Justice Maule, as a rising barrister, with briefs and fees coming in, returned from circuit to find his mother on her death-bed, the shock, we are told, was a severe one, for a keen sensibility was veiled under his blunt and independent manners, and he had always been devoted to his mother, the desire of pleasing whom had been his strongest motive for exertion; and it has been plausibly suggested that the kind of moody indifference and somewhat cynical disregard of conventionalities which he afterwards displayed may be in some measure attributed to the effect of this loss.

Southey's pathetic lines are not now quoted by the present writer for the first time: *

"Such consummation of my work will now
Be but a mournful close, the One being gone
Whom to have satisfied was still to me

A pure reward, outweighing far all breath
Of public praise."

* In the second volume of Recreations of a Recluse, pp. 308-320, may be found a variety of illustrations and parallel passages bearing on this theme.

THE HEART'S OWN SECRET OF BITTERNESS.

PROVERBS xiv. 10.

HE heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a

THE

stranger no more compasseth it than he intermeddleth with his joy. Of Him to whom we consecrate the words, "Never sorrow was like His sorrow," the proverb holds good with an emphasis all its own. As the poet of the Christian Year sings of His tears over doomed Jerusalem,—

"But hero ne'er or saint

The secret load might know,

With which His spirit waxeth faint;

His is a Saviour's woe."

But of every man in his degree the proverb holds good, at some point or other of his history, if not at very many points, and day by day continually.

"The world's a room of sickness, where each heart
Knows its own anguish and unrest."

Every one, in the words of King Solomon's Temple dedication service, every one knows his own sore and his own grief. The tongue touches where the tooth aches, but the best dentist cannot guess at the truth unless one opens one's mouth, Riccabocca sententiously sayeth. We can detect, quoth Harley L'Estrange, when something is on the mind-some care, some fear, some trouble; but when the heart closes over its own more passionate sorrow, who can discover, who conjecture? It is true, observes a philosophic essayist, that we have all much in common; but what we have most in common is this—that we are all isolated. Man is more than a combination of passions common to his kind.

THE HEART'S OWN BITTER SECRET.

137

"Beyond them and behind them, an inner life, whose current we think we know within us, flows on in solitary stillness." Friendship itself is declared to have nothing in common with this dark sensibility, so repellent and so forbidding-much less may a stranger penetrate to those untrodden shores. We may apply Wordsworth's lines,

To friendship let him turn
For succour; but perhaps he sits alone

On stormy waters, tossed in a little boat

That holds but him, and can contain no more." Chateaubriand expatiates in his memoirs on the bitterness of a private grief which the multitude cannot understand, and which is therefore all the more keenly felt: "Contrasting it with other ills does not blunt the edge of the affliction. One can never be the judge of another's grief. . . The hearts of men have divers secrets which are incomprehensible to other hearts." His practical application is, that we are not to dispute with others about the reality of their sufferings; it is with sorrows as with countries-each man has his own.

An old English divine remarks, in a passage which may otherwise be worth quoting, for the sake of its now obsolete use of the word methodist,—“ All of us have some or other tender part of our souls which we cannot endure should be ungently touched; every one must be his own methodist to find them out."* The term now appropriated by, or exclusively applied to, the followers of Wesley, once indicated those who were methodical in study, who employed a certain method in their philosophy and their practical ethics.

No saying is less heeded, Mr. Dallas affirms, than that of the heart solely cognizant of its own bitterness, though no more pregnant saying was ever penned." We see

* Jackson, Justifying Faith, b. iv. c. 5.

138 THE HEART'S OWN WELL-KEPT SECRET

each other glad or sad, he observes, but we do not understand the sources of each other's joy and misery; often we do not understand the sources of our own. Let any one study his own heart, says Professor H. Reed, and he will know that there are passions, whose very might and depth give them a sanctity which we instinctively recognize by veiling them from the gaze of others. "They are the sacred things of the temple of the human soul, and the common touch would only profane them." In childhood, indeed, tears are shed without restraint or disguise; but when the self-consciousness of manhood, as the professor puts it, has taught us that tears are the expression of those passions which are too sacred for exposure, "the heart will often in silence

break rather than violate this admirable instinct of our nature." It knoweth its own bitterness, and to intermeddling of any stranger, however well-intentioned, its style is Noli me tangere. The suffering spirit cannot descend from its dignity of reticence, Mr. Trollope somewhere says; a consciousness in particular of undeserved woe produces a grandeur of its own, with which the high-souled sufferer will not easily part. Madame de Staël rules that Nul a le droit de contester à un autre sa douleur. There is much implied in that short sentence, writes Mrs. Richard Trench, who quotes it in support of her expression of impatience at hearing any one too decisive on what may or may not deeply wound the bosom of another. *

See a letter of hers to Mrs. Leadbeater (Remains, p. 284) on a mother's incommunicable grief in "losing her little blossom." The letters of Frederick Perthes iterate the proverb in regard of family bereavement. "Each father's and mother's heart knows its own bitterness, and no third person can enter into it." This he says in declining to gratify a friend's curiosity about the loss itself, and the character of the departed (his son Rudolph). On another occasion, and with another kind of reference, he writes: "No one

OF INCOMMUNICABLE GRIEF.

139

Grief for the dead has been said to take its most touching and attractive form when it chastens and refines a whole life, rather than when its poignancy disables the mourner from everyday duties; the reason of this being, that with acute and overwhelming afflictions there is no real, at least no adequate, sympathy. "The widow and the childless have sorrows into which none can enter, and, therefore, with which none can, in the truest sense, fully sympathize. It is as in death— we die and grieve alone." As there is no companionship in the grave, so is there none in that stage of bereavement where the whole world is as a tomb. "There seems to be something superhuman-something, at any rate, out of the range of ordinary sympathy in the very aspect of a chilling and desolating grief," paralysing the mourner and the spectator too. It is justly observed, however, that not only are we not attracted, but we are apt to be almost repelled, by witnessing in our social relationships a spectacle of prolonged and agonizing sorrow :-because we cannot enter into it, we are tempted to stand aloof, if not to censure. "It is above us, and we cannot sympathize but with kindred natures. We almost judge it harshly, and call it selfish and overstrained. And herein we are generally wrong; we only misread the sentiment because we cannot understand it." In the pettiest character, says Canon Kingsley, there are unfathomable depths, which the poet, allseeing though he may pretend to be, can never analyse, but at most only dimly guess at. There are feelings which have their silent agony, writes the author of Violet, for

knows what a poor human heart feels, when such echoes of a vanished world would pierce his soul. The joy of meeting was mingled with grief; the joy I shared with others, and kept the grief to myself." So that in this case he exemplified only one of the clauses of Solomon's proverb.