Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/515

1868.] draws near in brightness as earth recedes in dimness. Thus doth God frequently make calamity and grief our best friends, causing saintly resolves and virtues to grow from the clefts and ruins of bereavement and failure; and

There is compensation for all tears. The tears of hypocrisy shall be avenged by the revulsion of self-retributive agencies in the traitorous soul that sheds them. Tears of joy are in themselves but the excess of pleasure, love or delight which finds no adequate vent, spontaneously overflowing in these warm streams. Tears of pain relieve, as they flow, the surcharged and tortured fountains of sensibility, as at the waving of a wand over the mind our suffering thoughts liquefy and run off through the sluiceways of the eyes, and the bursting brain is eased. Tears of sentiment are the vehicle of a high and holy luxury, and they soften and ennoble us by the culture they afford to all kindly sympathies Tears of remorse fulfil a benignant office of regeneration and reconciliation: from the sincere baptism of their anguish we rise with sanctified motives to a reformed life. And tears of grief are compensated by the mournful satisfaction itself of weeping over our cherished and vanished dreams, our loved and lost immortals; sometimes the swollen heart would break, the throbbing head would give way, were it not for the gushing relief of tears, the pious vigil of sacred tears; deprived of which, our divinest recollections and aspirations would die out or petrify within us. The grief which tears signify, they lessen by carrying it out and discharging the load. "The dry eye of great grief is nearly insane, its motionless attitude is the frost of catalepsy." If God, at our thoughtless intercession, would close all the sources of our tears, should we not rather implore him, Do it not; leave us still the power to weep! By tears the scorching fevers of sorrow are soothed to a peaceful softness, and our feelings are mellowed to resignation, and our minds are spiritualized to faith, and the very furnace-mouth of affliction is made a moist dell of comfort. The iris-circles around the pupils of the eyes in their humid suffusion gleam with the glory of the combined prismatic hues; and, looking forth through them, after a while, on an irradiated universe, we listen with wise and understanding heart to him who says to us,

As long as we live, through every epoch of our strange pilgrimage, we weep; but at the various stages how differently we weep, both in degree and kind! In youth, the genius of experience brings us a font filled with tears of hope; in age, an urn filled with tears of regret. Baptized from that, we are refreshed with expectation and energy; sprinkled from this, we are ready to extricate ourselves from perishable entanglements, and say farewell to an inconstant world. As we advance in age, weeping naturally becomes less gentle. Coriolanus says to his ancient friend.

In our last years, as in the final moment itself, there should be left only the limpid tears of grateful resignation. Yet each tear is fitted to its time and office, and, if are are docile, leaves a blessing with us. For, while our being endures,