Thus has a succession of these friendly years now visited me and gone: and, as far as we can see, thus will every future one repeat the lesson. If any person disputes, no one can disprove, the result, wrought out, as it is, by natural experience. It is no contradiction, that some are soured by suffering. Their pains, like mine, are gone; and with them, as with others, it is ideas which remain; and ideas are essentially good, a part of the indestructible inner life which must, from its very nature, sooner or later part with its evil, through experience of the superabounding good of the universe. If one so soured by pain dies in this mood, the ideal part of him is that which remains to be carried into a fresh scene, where the mood cannot be fed by the experience which nourished it here. If he lives long enough to change his mood, there is every probability that the benignant influences which are perpetually at work throughout life and nature will dissolve and disperse his troubles, as the eastern lights, the breath of morning and the chirp of birds, steal in upon the senses of the troubled sleeper, and thence possessing themselves of his reason, convince him that the miseries of the night season were but a dream. True and consoling as it may be for him, and for those about him, to find thus that “trouble may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” they have not fully learned the lessons of the sick-room if they are not aware that, while the troubles of that night season are thus sure to pass away, its product of thoughts and experiences must endure, till the stars which looked down upon the scene have dissolved in their courses. The constellations formed in the human soul, out of the chaos of pain, must have a duration compared with which, those of the firmament are but as the sparkles showered over the sea by the rising sun. To one still in this chaos,--if he do but see the creative process advancing,--it can be no reasonable matter of complaint, that his course is laid the while through such a region; and he will feel almost ashamed of even the most passing anxiety as to how soon he may be permitted to emerge. SYMPATHY TO THE INVALID. “The essence of friendship is entireness; a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.” EMERSON. “Our hands in one, we win not shrink From life’s severest due:-- Our hands in one, we win not blink The terrible and true.” MILNES.