The man whom I entirely envy is the man who
walks into the dark valley of misfortune or sickness or grief, or the
shadow of death, with a curious and inexpressible zest for facing and
interrogating the presences that haunt the place. For a man who does
this, his memory is not like a land where he loves to linger upon the
sunlit ridges of happy recollection, but a land where in reflection he
threads in backward thought the dark vale, the miry road, the craggy
rift up which he painfully climbed; the optimism that hurries with
averted glance past the shadow is as false as the pessimism that
hurries timidly across the bright and flowery meadow. The more we
realise the immutability of our lot, the more grateful we become for
our pains as well as for our delights. If we have still lives to live
and regions to traverse, after our eyes close upon the world, those
lives and those regions may be, as we love to think, tracts of serener
happiness and more equable tranquillity. But if they be still a
mixture, such as we here endure, of pain and pleasure, then our aim
ought to be at all costs to learn the lesson of endurance; or rather,
if we hold firmly to the sense of law, minute, pervading, unalterable
law, to welcome every step we make in the direction of courage and
hopefulness. In the midst of atrocious sorrow and suffering there is no
sense so blessed as the sense that dawns upon the suffering heart that
it can indeed endure what it had represented to itself as unendurable,
and that however sharply it suffers, there is still an inalienable
residue of force and vitality which cannot be exhausted.
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