Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/514

482 pining loneliness and heart-break; lamentable accompaniments to voices of Rachels weeping for their children, to voices of youth sighing in visionary griefs, to voices of age moaning over the graves of vanished years and buried affections. How many memories, whose subjects went long ago, are kept green, year after year, by showers of remembering tears! Of how many a one it may be said, as of the sister of the dead Lazarus, "She goeth to the grave to weep there!" In thousands of hallowed spots, where now sleeps a little dust, dearer once than the world, the sods are freshened every spring by other rain than that which falls from the clouds. The son stands by the coffin of an adored mother, the father lingers by the grave of a dear daughter, the husband returns to his desolate home whence the companion of his bosom has been borne—and as they re-member the days, the endearments, the worshipped image, that are gone from them now, they cry with irrepressible sobs, "O she was the holiest and the gentlest spirit, and we will weep a funeral elegy of tears for her!"

It was a touching custom with the ancient Romans to hang up lachrymatories—small vials full of the tears shed over their loss—in the tombs of their departed friends. Sometimes we meet with these affecting mementoes, in the parlors of distant countries, where they have been brought by travellers who plucked them from their niches in the sepulchres of forgotten families. Their contents, long since evaporated, lined with rust or mould, tacit preachers of by-gone times and sorrows, how movingly they speak of the human prey of oblivion, and remind us of the inevitable doom of all mortal forms and names! Fast as the regrets of one period are exhaled those of a new one appear, and there is no cessation of these mournful sighs and dews. Abundant indeed are the occasions, in this mingled and transitory life, for the tears of grief; and they must continue to flow as long as the world holds a single representative of the family of man.

Pass we now from the sources of tears to their compensations. Milton says that when Adam and Eve looked back on the happy garden from which they had been driven, "Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon." Rivers of this salt rain have since then swept down the face of humanity. But it is our faith that none of it has flowed in vain. There is One who invisibly marks every sigh, every tear, and, in his own time, compensates to the full. Is it not written, "He that goeth forth weeping, and soweth precious seed, shall come again, rejoicing, and bringing his sheaves with him?" Christianity, with the profoundest insight, has been named the Religion of Sorrow. Its author declared, "Blessed are they that mourn." In every age tears have been a humanizing power, softening the hardness of brutal hearts, appealing to beautiful sentiments, by their fruits of gentleness and sympathy, making amends for the hurts out of which they spring. They have melted the frozen summits of pride, brought a fresh verdure on the wastes of worldliness and sin, and nourished, wherever they have flowed across the plains of life, the celestial flowers of pity, charity, and grace. Let the mourner weep on then: every tear shed in earthly grief shall be a pearl in the heavenly river. Faith, baulked of payment for unmerited pangs in the present, "reaches a hand through time to catch the far-off interest of tears" safely invested in eternity. Think not either that the prosperous and the gay light-hearted sporters in the radiance of pleasure, are the most favored, even here below. There are peculiar blessings for the hearts that are heavy and for the eyes that weep. When we mourn, then we forsake then temptations leave us; then we grow pure and devout, and heaven