Once more I had sunshine. The clouds seemed to depart as suddenly
as they had risen, and that same rejoicing and rosy light which had
encircled the brow of manhood at its dawn long shrouded, seemingly
lost for ever, and swallowed up in darkness--came out as softly
and quietly in the maturer day, as if its sweet serene had never
known even momentary obscuration.
Love, verily, is the purple light of youth. If it abides, blessing
and blessed, with the unsophisticated heart, youth never leaves
us. Gray brows make not age--the feeble step, the wrinkled visage,
these indicate the progress of time, but not the passage of youth.
Happy hearts keep us in perpetual spring, and the glow of childhood
without its weaknesses is ours to the final limit of seventy. The
sense of desolation, the pang of denial, the baffled hope, and the
defrauded love, these constitute the only age that should ever give
the heart a pang. I can fancy a good man advancing through all the
mortal stages from seventeen to seventy-five, and crowned by the
sympathies of corresponsive affections, simply going on from youth
to youth, ending at last in youth's perfect immortality!
The hope of this--not so much a hope as an instinct--is the faith
of our boyhood. The boy, as the father of the man, transmits this
hope to riper years; but if the experience of the day correspond
not with the promise of the dawn, how rapidly old age comes upon
us! White hairs, lean cheeks, withered muscles, feeble steps, and
that dull, dead feeling about the heart--that utter abandonment
of cheer--which would be despair were it not for a certain blunted
sensibility--a sort of drowsy indifference to all things that the
day brings forth, which, as it takes from life the excitement of
every passion, leaves it free from the sting of any. Yet, were not
the tempest better than the calm? Who would not prefer to be driven
before the treacherous hurricane of the blue gulf, than to linger
midway on its shoreless waters, and behold their growing stagnation
from day to day? The apathy of the passions is the most terrible
form in which age makes its approaches.
With an earnest, sanguine temperament, such as mine, there is
little danger of such apathy, The danger is not from lethargy but
madness. I had escaped this danger. It was surprising, even to
myself, how suddenly my spirits had arisen from the pressure that
had kept them down. In a moment, as it were, that mocking troop
of fears and sorrows which environed me, took their departure. It
seemed that it was only necessary for me to know that I was about
to lose the presence of William Edgerton to find this relief.
And yet, how idle! With an intense egoisme, such as mine, I should
conjure up an Edgerton in the deepest valleys of our country.
We have our gods and devils in our own hearts. The nature of the
deities we worship depends upon our own. In a savage state, the
Deity is savage, and expects bloody sacrifices; with the progress
of civilization his attributes incline to mercy. The advent of Jesus
Christ indicated the advance of the Hebrews to a higher sense of
the human nature. It was the advent of the popular principle, which
has been advancing steadily ever since and keeping due pace with
the progress of Christian education. The people were rising at the
expense of the despotism which had kept them down. It does not affect
the truth of this to show that the polish of the Jewish nation was
lessened at this period. Nay, rather proves it, since the diffusion
of a truth or a power must always lessen its intensity In teaching,
for the first time, the doctrine of the soul's immortality, the
Savior laid the foundation of popular rights, in the elevation of
the common humanity--since he thus showed the equal importance, in
the sight of God, of every soul that had ever taken shape beneath
his hands.