Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/510

478 self, that is, possessed by the melting genius of Christianity, she rather represents a statue changed into flesh and charged with tears. Then, at the spectacle of her, all that is holiest in us grows tenderer. But a virago is worse than a ruffian.

Let us proceed to the various characterization of tears :

The whole moral gamut of man stretches between the extremes of his weeping; on the one side, the shameful drops shed under a whipping, and the scalding drops of chagrin; on the other side, the pure tribute drawn by the sublimity of a landscape, and the more solemn tribute paid by a penitent kneeling before his God. The tears that are shed in the world may be best classified by describing the sources from which they flow, and the emotions that accompany them. They have many founts, welling from different depths, saturated with different properties, and flowing to different results. A mystic chemistry, well known to experience, though eluding the grasp of science, extracts from the soul the special qualities of our tears in the varying exigencies of our emotion; for each kind has its peculiar ingredients, from the cold and deadly tears of hatred to the warm and healing tears of love. The attitude of the soul, the direction in which we are looking—in any season of extreme emotion—imparts a distinctive character to our weeping. We have tears of reverence for august superiors, tears of gentle compassion for the sorrows of those around us, and generous tears of pity for the calamities of inferiors. Had we some reagent of sufficient delicacy, some infallible litmus or turmeric, on the application of its test, every species of human tears would be discriminated by the color and intensity of its reaction; every one would be seen to have constituents or proportions appropriate to itself. The series of experiences or changes going on in our spiritual consciousness are accompanied by a parallel series of phenomenal changes in our material organs and their products. There must be, if we had instruments fine and powerful enough to detect it, a difference in the molecular structure and dynamic stamp of those tears of envy or indignant and revengeful mortification which exude from the eyes as the secretions ooze from the dripping fangs of serpents, and of those tears of injured sensibility which bleed like precious gums from the pierced trees of the East, or of those tears of atoning regret to which Phineas Fletcher alludes in his personification of penitence:

This chemistry of the spirit is not yet advanced enough to teach us the lessons we should like to learn. One important moral, however, it is already competent to enforce. In the atomic constitution of a tear, the proportion of water—the emblem of public universality—is to the other materials almost as an hundred to one; a fine lesson of the relation our disinterested griefs should bear to our selfish ones. The tears of wounded egotism are the least attractive or respectable of the lachrymal family. The most beautiful and potent are those of impersonal sympathy, such as Christ shed in his lament over Jerusalem.

The first and worst fountain of tears that attracts our notice—the one which we would fain believe to be the most rarely opened—is the poisonous fountain