Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/92

 parties to the domestic compact have severally failed to realize what common sense ought to have suggested from the first—that human happiness is never direct, but is always reflected. When the married find out this great law, and practically apply it, society will redeem itself from all hatred and harlotry, license and libertinism, free-love and folly, madness, murder and meanness. Ah! friendly reader, it is a 'fearful state, that wherein a woman's or a man's true and generous love and sympathies are driven down and beaten away by those to whom they naturally cling. It is hard to have their human kindness misconstrued, and to have his or her affection crushed by the heedlessness or lack of generosity of those who ought to leap, and hail it with all true human thankfulness. God knows that there is too little real affection in the world, and it is very hard to have that little forced back upon the full, true heart from which it was sent forth on a mission of goodness. This sort of thing it is that freezes up the spirit, and makes man and woman lonely hermits in the very midst of the teeming hives of human life, society and effort.

It is a terrible thing to be compelled to eat your own heart—to be forced to consume oneself—to hear the harsh, brutal and unfeeling tone, when one should listen to the dulcet notes of generous affections; for they freeze and chill the spirit, and warp the very ligaments of Soul. These sad things must be atoned; the vicarious sacrifice must be self-made by the doer thereof—persons who unthinkingly tear down and wreck their fellows, every soul of whom might be builded up. made strong for the Right, and emulous of