Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/159

 THE RANDALL FAMIL Y I 5 I

ment hardly less disagreeable than their death. I truly think that a friend should be kept, unless wholly uncon- genial or unless he estranges himself. I know well my- self the sorrow of mourning. I know well how the nights and the days, as they succeed one another, enhance weari- ness and diminish hope, and how life wastes itself away without delight and without object ; and I have nothing in me which could ever desire such a state for another. All persons to whom the affections are anything must go through with it, and, though love becomes somewhat sub- divided among a multitude of friends, yet their number helps greatly to endure the loss of each. The Christian is told not to mourn as those who have no hope. The Par- kerites, I suppose, are also told not to mourn, though they have no hope but in the personal character of Christ — being, as I suppose, persons who sit between the two stools of philosophy and religion, but without the consola- tion of either. I do not see why the philosopher need mourn, at least, any more than the last, seeing that he would not dare change the lot of humanity if he could, and must perforce believe all is for the best, while depending on the personal character of no one.

As for myself, you will desire, perhaps, to know how I (after a week's interval, for I am now finishing my letter at Boston after an interruption of several days) — how I bear this loss ; and I will tell you. I bear it as one who cannot help himself, and has been even more severely afflicted several times before. It were unmanly to lament ; the event was impossible to be helped, inevitable in pros- pect ; and I am ashamed to murmur. There has not been a day, perhaps not an hour, since I was a child, that Death has not been present in my thought. In experience he has made himself even more severely felt. While I

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