 | This, that and the other |  |
CHANGE.
O word, colder, more bitter, more terrible than death! Word,
whose lightest meaning is a great gulf, with black, surging waters,
over which not even the angel wing of Hope has power to pass.
Fearful spectre! — how can I comprehend its meaning, when
such fond arms are hedging me from care, such dear eyes making
sunshine in my life! We can put the grave-yard sod above a
loved one's brow and live; for we can weep over the grave, and
put flowers on it. The pictured face, the curl of sunny hair, can
be bathed in tears; for Pride, that passion stronger than life, or
love, and erewhile stronger than Heaven, forbids us not to shrine
in our hearts the memories of the dead, to build altars to the
loved, and lost, and gone before.
But Change! When the dear lips smile still, but the smile is
not for us; when the curls are long and sunny, but our fingers
may not twine them; when the voice swells still with music, but
the name on which it lingers is not ours, — then, indeed, are our
life-paths written desolate; then does stern Pride put her finger on
our lips, and choke and strangle every thought that would breathe
his name; then do we lock up the olden memories in our hearts,
and, struggling for escape in vain, they can only walk to and
fro, like caged beasts.
It is a strange, mystic word; whose meaning we only fully
learn after months and years of anguish.
When the summer days are long, and they cannot watch with
down the sunset slopes, trembling to its death; when the hymn
falters on our lips, and the prayers are hushed, because their
voice joints not in them, there only steals to our souls a faint,
creeping shadow of the desolation which is to come!
What wonder that our heart is baptized in tears, at the
thought of another brow lying on the breast where only our head
should have rested, of other lips being pressed to the shrine of
our own idolatry? And yet it must be.
There is no rest, save that which broods, bird-like, with its
great white wings, above the tide of death; no abiding-place,
save the fields that lie so green and sunny in the God-light of
heaven!
But fain would I put the evil day far off. Fain would I pray
our Father that the sunlight may linger long about my home,
and the day be a long time hid in the cloud of coming years,
when time, or death, or fate, shall brand the heart I trust with
the cold word Change!
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