Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/89

 to loneliness, as if they were thus expiating some awful penalty as an atonement for great and undreamed-of crimes, committed either by themselves in some preexistent state, or by their ancestors when the very world was young. There are those who, while all about and around them are merry and jocund as the bees on a May day, are themselves as far removed from the pale of human sympathy, and as utterly, as if they were shut up in some rock-ribbed cave in the heart of Mont Blanc or the Mountains of the Moon. O, it is a fearful thing to be shut out from the great Sympathia whose function is to blend in one the chords of all human hearts! It is a sad fate indeed to be obliged to live amidst the clamor and the clang of Discord, when all other souls are dancing to the glorious sounds of the great Harmonead; yet many such, aye, far too many such there be, who are thus cut off, shut up, barred out. They might have been let in, had the father given the mother a smile, a caress, a blessing, at the proper moment, instead of a frown, a rudeness and a secret curse, as is, alas! too often the case; and yet nothing is more positively certain than that somebody must answer to their own souls, their own consciences, for this most fearful entailment of misery, loneliness and woe. See! yonder is a woman—a wife—big with a man-child, who will ere long see the light; but she is miserable—is lonely, is perchance cursed for becoming—a mother; and so she frets, and mopes, and pines—all the while paining to be delivered of her misery and child. At length it sees the day, the sun's bright laugh meets no responsive smile from its pale, thin, tiny lips. It mopes and grows, but is prematurely old at ten years, a man at fifteen, a