If we wish our precepts to be followed, we must avoid the extremes to which moralists and philosophers are too much inclined to press their doctrines, for they are impracticable in real life. It is useless to deny that there are evils against which the aids of reason and friendship are powerless. Let us leave him who is about to lose a being whose life is blended with his own, to groan unreproved. Time alone can enfeeble his remembrances and assuage his pain. To render man inaccessible to suffering would be to change his nature. Those austere moralists who treat our feebleness with disdain, and who would render us indifferent to the most terrible blows of destiny, would at the same time leave us no sensibility to taste pleasure. Nothing can be more absurd than the vain harangues by which common-place consolation is offered to those who mourn a wife, a child, a friend. All reasonings are ineffectual when opposed to these words, ‘I have lost the loved one. You inform me that my misfortune is without a remedy. Oh! if there were a remedy, instead of unavailing tears, I would employ it. It is precisely because there is none, that I grieve.’ ‘Your tears are useless.’ ‘Still they serve to solace me.’ ‘God has done it.’ ‘True, and God has formed my heart to suffer from his blow.’ ‘Your child is happy, and knew neither the errors nor the sorrows of life.’ ‘A parent’s instinctive love inspired the desire that I might teach it to avoid both and obtain happiness.’ ‘In the course of a long career your friend gave an example of all the virtues.’ ‘It is because the loss of these virtues is irreparable to me that I must deplore his death.’[11] The greater portion of men, I admit, exaggerating their regrets, pay a tribute of dissembled grief rather to opinion, than to nature; and cold declamation and frivolous distractions are sufficient to console them. But the orators of consolation sometimes press their lessons on hearts which are really bleeding. Let such groan at liberty, and attempt not to contradict nature. Solitude may exalt the imagination; but it also inspires consoling ideas. In the silence of its refuge the desolate mourner brings himself to a nearer communion with him he regrets. He invokes, sees, and addresses him. Grief is more ingenious than we imagine in finding consolation, and has learned to employ different remedies according as the wounds are slight or deep. Two persons have each lost a dear friend. The one studiously avoids the places where he used to meet his friend. The other repairs to his desolate haunts, and surrounding himself by monuments associated with his memory, he seeks, if I may so say, to restore him to life.