Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/187

Rh the great facts in their peculiar story; and mankind learns the lesson they were meant to teach, writ in the great events of the cosmic life of man.

These things should, indeed, be so. It were wrong to miss a single bright day from the story of a man, a nation, or mankind. Let us mark these days, and be glad.

But there are periods of sorrow, not less than joy. There comes a shipwreck to the man; and though he tread the waters under him, and come alive to land, yet his memorydrips with sorrow for many a year to come. The widow marks her time by dating from the day which shore off the better portion of herself, counting her life by years of widowhood. Marius, exiled, hunted after, denied fire and water, a price set on his head, just escaping the murderers and the sea, "sitting a fugitive on the ruins of Carthage" which he once destroyed, himself a sadder ruin now, folds his arms and bows his head in manly grief.

These days also are remembered. It takes long to efface what is written in tears. For ever the father bears the annual wound that rent his child away: fifty years do not fill up the tomb which let a mortal through the earth to heaven. The anniversaries of grief return. At St Helena, on the eighteenth of every June, how Napoleon remembered the morning and the evening of the day at Waterloo, the beginning and the ending of his great despair!

So the nations mourn at some great defeat, and hate the day thereof. How the Frenchman detests the very name of Waterloo, and wishes to wipe off from that battle-field the monument of earth the allies piled thereon, commemorative of his nation's loss! Old mythologies are true to this feeling of mankind, when they relate that the spirit of some great man who died defeated comes and relates that he is sad: they tell that—

An antique nation, with deep faith in God, looks on these defeats as correction from the hand of Heaven. In sorrow the Jew counts from the day of his exile, mourning that the city sitteth solitary that was full of people; that among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her; that she dwelleth among the heathen and hath no rest. But, he