Knowing that we can nevermore return.
Yet now and then a sunset or a flower, Or some old haunt revisited once more, Or the sea's story whispered to the shore,
Or the wind's music in a listening bower, ^ Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 305.
372 THE WELL BY THE GATE
Will bring again the unalloyed delight
We knew before our life had held a wrong, Eecall the refrain of a cradle-song,
And lift the shadows from our saddened sidit.^
IV.
How WAS THE Longing Satisfied?
1. Water was brought to David from the very well of which he desired to drink. Three of these mighty men overheard that longing as it broke forth from his weary spirit. They waited for no command, they sounded no trumpet, they summoned no companies, but forth they went and perilled their very lives that David might have his wish. They fought their way to the well of Bethlehem — the well by the gate ; they drew for their master ; with their swords they cleared their way as they returned to the cave of Adullam, and there they presented the crystal draught the king had longed for. But the pure sweet water he had longed for' above all things was now nothing to him in itself though he had it in his hands. He would not drink it. He knew now that he wanted it no more ; or rather he knew that deeper than the thirst for water had been the longing of his wearied spirit which mere water could not satisfy.
2. If David could have gone back to the actual scenes of his childhood, he would still have been unsatisfied. He might have returned to the home of his boyhood and revisited scenes amid which he had wandered free from care, and the fields and the trees and the streams which he loved might have been around him — the same, yet how different ! The charm is gone. He has returned to the home ; but he can never return to the feelings of his youthful days. There is no actual going back. We cannot begin again, start afresh, make a new attempt, with the added experience of life, as many of us would like to do — " To the land whereunto they desire to return, thither shall they not return." We cannot now re-write the story of our lives. The record, with all its faults, mistakes, confusions, sins, must stand. Nor can
* Percy 0. Ainsworth, Poems and Sonnets, 31.
2 SAMUEL XXIII. 15 373
we replace the losses of the heart, the separations of death, and alas ! the separations of life.
^ We return to a memory-haunted scene, and how strangely the hills, the streams, the streets have dwindled and shrunk together. Size is relative to that central affection which magnifies all its store of surroundings. That which is about us has its perspective, not in fact, but in love's wiser fancy. We cannot restore the outer ratio of what made life's earliest impressions. A secret and vanished beauty fails of reattachment to visible things. The lute is hushed, the chairs are vacant, and Charles Lamb's plaint rises to pallid lips : —
Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood, Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
The well is shallower. The waters that " were wont to go warbling so softly and well " do not flow as they used to flow. Their gush and sparkle have escaped, and something insipid and tasteless has come. The sweetness was about, not in, the draught. The taste was in the tongue and the lips that have changed.^
3. David here was crying for his vanished childhood, and in a moment certain things happened which proved to him that he was richer as a man than he had ever been as a child. He had won friendships that were faithful to him even unto death. Three men among his followers, as soon as they heard his cry, went off, without a moment's doubt, to obey ; they broke through an army, their lives hanging by a hair at every turn, on the mere chance of bringing him a draught. It was surely more than all the delights of childhood to have gained such devotion, such love, as that ! It was brought home to him that even here, in dreary AduUam, with its bitter experiences and brackish water, he had what not even Bethlehem with all its wells could give him. He had gained much, though he had lost much. He had gained more than he had lost.
There are better things than the glory of childhood, just as the gnarled, strong, winter- worn oak is nobler than the slender sapling with its first shoots of green. God did not send us into the world to be always children ; but to be strong, long-suffering,
» M. W. Stryker.
374 THE WELL BY THE GATE
serviceable men and women; to make friends and deserve their friendship; to learn patience through sorrow and courage by facing difficulties, and to take a real soldier's part in the great battle of life. And if we are doing that, there is no need to sigh for our Bethlehem days. A man, if he has grown with some sense of duty, with some fear of God, and in a religious way ; if he has fought with temptation and not always yielded ; if he has learned some of the finer lessons which experience teaches, is in all ways richer than he was as a youth or a little child. His thoughts are larger and wiser; his whole conception of things is more Godlike ; his sympathies are wider ; his world is a bigger place. He loves and pities his fellow-men more ; his hands and brain and heart are fitter for work ; his influence is greater ; and the world which thanks God for the children ought to thank God even more for him.