Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/513

1868.] plaintive music, musing on many things—are finely touched to these fine issues. The kindliest and wealthiest members of our race, preserving in literature the contagious records of such rare experiences, enrich their fellow-beings with them.

The man of a hard prosaic nature is shut out from this sweet sadness, unable to enter the alluring thicket of these dewy mysteries. In him the pious springs of sentiment were either never supplied or have been dried away by the simoom of selfishness. Let him not, comparing with the copious largesses of a magnanimous sympathy the thin, sparse droplets which are all his niggard nature spares, interpret the former as a proof of incontinent weakness. It is the chronic fallacy of inferiority to regard itself as superiority. This man cannot shed, would feel ashamed of such tears as we describe. In his mental meanness and isolation he little knows how deeply humanity and the Author of humanity are ashamed of him.

Once more, as we journey across the land of life, we come to a new fountain of tears. In a country charred with the conflagrations of sin and folly, and strewn with the lava of regret, upbursts the fiery fountain of remorse. Nemesis, the winged and sworded goddess of retribution, is the unrelenting guardian of this fountain. At every motion of her wings, at every blow of her scourge, at every frown of her countenance, the caustic drops of shame and self-torture rush across their brim and burn down the face. These are the severest of tears, this the most terrible of the fountains of human affliction. There is a balm for other eyes, a consolation for other hearts; but what shall assuage those which are overshadowed and torn by upbraiding memories of crime, pierced and wrung by bitter recollections of wrong, carelessness, injury and neglect?

The darkest of tears are the tears of remorse. Conscience charges them with burning gall, and they wear a mournful channel of ineffaceable traces in the flushed or pallid cheeks along which they course. May grace save us from them! For they are often wept on earth, falling like drops of fire and blood, in secret places, in public paths, in prisons, in palaces. Every cruel and abandoned man or woman will surely awake, sooner or later, to confront the immutable laws of God, between the contrasting mirrors of innocence and wickedness; and then—"There shall be weeping and wailing;" then, over hardened faces, and from eyes long unused to the melting mood, must flow, in mortification and agony, the stinging tears of remorse.

Finally, in this pursuit and enumeration of the sources of tears we reach the last and largest of all, the lonely fountain of grief Weeping willows wave mournfully by its border; solemn cypresses gird it about, with a dirge-like wail of winds in their boughs; its waters are very dark and bitter; and full often must the most of mortals taste them. By night and by day the veiled and voiceless angel of bereavement stands by that fountain, and so frequently as her entering step troubles it, the tears of mourners flow. This fountain is deep. More tears are drawn from it by sorrow than are drawn from all the rest by all other causes. The sundering fates make us weep, and many a parting kiss is "distasted with the salt of broken tears." From the first, the atmosphere of humanity has been full of these tears; bitter tears of disappointment, separation,