The immortal moods that faded, the god who died, Hastening away to the King on a distant call.
There were ruby dews shed when the heart was riven.
And passionate pleading and prayers to the dead we had wronged ;
And we passed away, unremembering and unforgiven, Hastening away to the King for the peace we longed.
Love unremembered and heart-ache we left behind,
We forsook them, unheeding, hastening away in our flight;
We knew the hearts we had wronged of old we would find When we came to the fold of the King for rest in the night.2
(3) Eemember the Happiness of the way as well as the sorrow. We do not take half joy enough, the joy which we have a right to take, in the goodly world which our God hath built and adorned for us, in the wonderful and beautiful work which is spread round us with unsparing hand, and which an angel might ^ E. Griffith- Jones. 2 A. E., The Divine Fisim, 8.
i6 REMEMBER ALL THE WAY
stop to gaze on with rapture. Poor we may be and struggling, and all the higher interests and joys of life — art, literature, music — may be tasted but rarely, and in drops. But the Great Artist has taken thought for the poor. He wills that their joys shall not be scant. The beauty, the glory, which Art at its highest faintly adumbrates, is theirs in profusion. Each moment they have within easy reach works of His hand whose far-off image, reproduced by man, the rich of this world would buy at untold cost.
There are those who indulge in the morbid memory. They live among the sorrows of the past and haunt its graves. They are familiar with the great illnesses and minor ailments of their lives, and date every event by some misfortune that happened in the same year or week. There is nothing they love more than to tell us in circumstantial detail of all the unpleasant, terrible, tragic things that have happened since last we met. Their memory is like a vault. Happy are those whose memory is like that old sundial in Italy — of which Hazlitt writes so finely — in- scribed with the motto, "I record only the sunny hours," and who, in thinking of the days gone by, try to preserve only the brighter, kindlier, vitalizing treasures of experience.
^ A few days before sailing for England from America I went to see a blind man who had been among the veterans of Pitts- burg, and who had the medal given by his nation for valour in the field. I looked upon him with emotion, for he had been a gallant soldier and a devoted patriot. I said to him, " What do you do in these days of darkness ? " and his reply was, " Thank God, doctor, for fifty years I had my sight, and I was permitted to see Abraham Lincoln, and I heard the bugles call men to the fight for freedom and for truth, and I now go back to those scenes while shut in this walled darkness and bring them before me in stately procession, and throw around them my imaginative powers, and so the hours of dulness and despair are kept at a distance. When I lost my sight I gained new powers of memory." ^
H There is a description which I have never forgotten, in one of Eobert Louis Stevenson's fascinating books of travel, of the im- pression produced upon his mind by listening to the wail of the Miserere in a Continental cathedral. " I take it," he said, " to be the composition of an atheist." The verdict is severe, but I am bound to think it just. At any rate, the deliberate rehearsal of
* S. Parkes Cadman.
DEUTERONOMY viii. 2 17
all the miseries and agonies of men must inevitably cultivate in them the feeling of self-pity, with an underlying insinuation, I should say, that they have been hardly used, and that life is a dismal matter at the best. So far as we can understand the situation, the Hebrews, the people to whom Moses spoke, had very generally become infected with the temper and spirit of self- pity.i
H In The Glasgow Herald of 6th May 1911 there appeared a sketch entitled " An East Coast Fishwife," by E. A. G. K., from which the following is taken : " It must have been a hard, busy life all those years. Would you care to go through it all again ? " I asked. She looked thoughtfully at me for a moment. " Aye, wad I, frae the very beginning. I've had health and strength, a gude faither an' mither, an' a kind man. Jamie and me had aye muckle tae be thankfu' for. Gin the day's wark was lang, we had oor ain fireside, and oor rest at nicht ; and the bairns had a' dune weel. I wadna want ony o't. Whiles when I'm sittin' yonder daein' ma bit shooin' — for I can see fine tae shoo yet — I jist see them a' afore me, leevin and deid, wee bairnies an' auld folk, and I aye think the Almichty is won'erfu' kind in gie'n' auld folk the power 0' mindin' a' the pleesures they hae had, and the lang road they have traivelt, an' the folk they have kent. Gin ye hae a lang life, ye hae mony memories ; an' I wadna pairt wi' ony 0' mine."