Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/509

1868.] out a cloud between. We know nothing literally of angels or of demons; they are poetry. Yet, regarded as an ideal conception, some things are congruous with them, other things incongruous. And we know nothing more befitting the nature and lot of a fiend than weeping and wailing ; and various mythologies picture dreadful rivers of tears in the diabolic land of doom. The most inspired secular genius that ever was says, too, that man

Yet, on the whole, we must regard these emblems as exceptional, above and below. Of the redeemed inhabitants of heaven it is written, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." Unentangled truth and unmarred beauty fill their vision, unalloyed love and unimpeded progress satisfy their powers; and they have no need of the solace of these sad outlets. But though in Paradise there be no occasion for tears of sorrow, remorse, or shame, it is natural to suppose that surprises of gladness and of pity, sudden revelations of beauty and sublimity, may force these swift signals to the surface. And it has usually been believed that the Recording Angel himself sometimes blots out an entry with a tear.

Despite the exceptions, however, of hound and fawn, of ape and elephant, weeping is the especial attribute of man. And tears, furthermore, if sometimes found in heaven and hell, belong emphatically to the earth. They hang it around with a misty and gleaming veil, through whose translucent folds sun and shower strive, and paint the world with the shaded colors of our life. Constituted and situated as we are, there is often in tears a melancholy comfort which outweighs the associated suffering; and we would not choose but say, as a gentle spirit said, in his mourning,

The stoic pride or misanthropic hardness that would disdain ever to melt in the pathetic straits of our destiny, is alien to the spirit of true religion, and contradicts the finest fitnesses of our nature. When the ferocious Philip, in Schiller's play, has scornfully stigmatized tears as fit only for cowardice and shame, the generous Carlos exclaims,

When distilled by pure passions, these drops of feeling, instead of disgracing, honor us. They are not badges of humiliation flung on our weakness, but gems with which the soul adorns its royalty. They are the liquified diamonds of the mind, as diamonds themselves may be called the petrified tears of the earth. Especially displeasing, not to say odious, is the sight of an unyielding temper and an imperious coldness in a woman. We expect her to be the impersonation of all soft graces, susceptible to the most delicate of imponderable agencies. When, under the influence of a pagan spirit, she is hard and rigid, like the weeping Niobe turned to stone, we are horror-struck; for, in her proper