A Mortal Antipathy | Page 7

his being with me so long as my self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.
The years passed away, and the influences derived from the companionships I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own current of being. Then there came to me a new experience in my relations with an eminent member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually for a long period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a prelude to a work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances. He was the subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost necessarily fatal disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon itself if it were not supplied with food from without, he determined to write a treatise on a subject which had greatly interested him, and which would oblige him to bestow much of his time and thought upon it, if indeed he could hold out to finish the work. During the period while he was engaged in writing it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect health, died suddenly of pneumonia. Physical suffering, mental distress, the prospect of death at a near, if uncertain, time always before him, it was hard to conceive a more terrible strain than that which he had to endure. When, in the hour of his greatest need, his faithful companion, the wife of many years of happy union, whose hand had smoothed his pillow, whose voice had consoled and cheered him, was torn from him after a few days of illness, I felt that my friend's trial was such that the cry of the man of many afflictions and temptations might well have escaped from his lips: "I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder; he hath also taken me by my neck and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground."
I had dreaded meeting him for the first time after this crushing blow. What a lesson he gave me of patience under sufferings which the fearful description of the Eastern poet does not picture too vividly! We have been taught to admire the calm philosophy of Haller, watching his faltering pulse as he lay dying; we have heard the words of pious resignation said to have been uttered with his last breath by Addison: but here was a trial, not of hours, or days, or weeks, but of months, even years, of cruel pain, and in the midst of its thick darkness the light of love, which had burned steadily at his bedside, was suddenly extinguished.
There were times in which the thought would force itself upon my consciousness, How long is the universe to look upon this dreadful experiment of a malarious planet, with its unmeasurable freight of suffering, its poisonous atmosphere, so sweet to breathe, so sure to kill in a few scores of years at farthest, and its heart-breaking woes which make even that brief space of time an eternity? There can be but one answer that will meet this terrible question, which must arise in every thinking nature that would fain "justify the ways of God to men." So must it be until that
"one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves"
has become a reality, and the anthem in which there is no discordant note shall be joined by a voice from every life made "perfect through sufferings."
Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years of companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend, in retracing which I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.
And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of intimacy with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than while he was here in living form and feature. I did not know how difficult a task I had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man whom all, or almost all, agree upon as one of the great lights of the New World, and whom very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah. Never before was I so forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of the work of a newspaper editor,--that threshing of straw already thrice beaten by the flails of other laborers in the same field. What could be said that had not been said of "transcendentalism" and of him who was regarded as its prophet; of the poet whom some admired without understanding, a few understood, or thought they did, without admiring, and many both understood and admired,--among these there being not a small number who went far beyond admiration, and lost themselves in devout worship? While one exalted him as