A Mortal Antipathy | Page 7

was honored by the marks of distinction
which gathered about him, I was wronged by the indignity from which
he suffered, mourned with him in his sorrow, and thus, after I had been
living for months with his memory, I felt as if I should carry a part of
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