Let Your Reason
Serve You As Well As Its Lower Faculties Have Served This Brave Little
Traveller From A Distant Land."
Is this then the best consolation my mysterious mentor can offer?
How
vain, how false it is! - how little can reason help us! The small bird
exists only in the present; there is no past, nor future, nor knowledge
of death. Its every action is the result of a stimulus from outside;
its "bravery" is but that of a dead leaf or ball of thistle-down
carried away by the blast. Is there no escape, then, from this
intolerable sadness - from the thought of springs that have been, the
beautiful multitudinous life that has vanished? Our maker and mother
mocks at our efforts - at our philosophic refuges, and sweeps them away
with a wave of emotion. And yet there is deliverance, the old way of
escape which is ours, whether we want it or not. Nature herself in her
own good time heals the wound she inflicts - even this most grievous in
seeming when she takes away from us the faith and hope of reunion with
our lost. They may be in a world of light, waiting our coming - we do
not know; but in that place they are unimaginable, their state
inconceivable. They were like us, beings of flesh and blood, or we
should not have loved them. If we cannot grasp their hands their
continued existence is nothing to us. Grief at their loss is just as
great for those who have kept their faith as for those who have lost
it; and on account of its very poignancy it cannot endure in either
case.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 195 of 244
Words from 52602 to 52879
of 66164
