The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
you might be tempted to damage yourself or somebody else with it, before
departing for the Rocky Mountains.
Do not think me heartless for what I say, or assume, that, because I
happen to be healthy myself, I have no mercy for ill-health in others.
There are invalids who are objects of sympathy indeed, guiltless heirs
of ancestral disease, or victims of parental folly or sin,--those whose
lives are early blighted by maladies that seem as causeless as they are
cureless,--or those with whom the world has dealt so cruelly that all
their delicate nature is like sweet bells jangled,--or those whose
powers of life are all exhausted by unnoticed labors and unseen
cares,--or those prematurely old with duties and dangers, heroes of
thought and action, whose very names evoke the passion and the pride of
a hundred thousand hearts. There is a tottering feebleness of old age,
also, nobler than any prime of strength; we all know aged men who are
floating on, in stately serenity, towards their last harbor, like
Turner's Old Téméraire, with quiet tides around them, and the blessed
sunset bathing in loveliness all their dying day. Let human love do its
gracious work upon all these; let angelic hands of women wait upon
their lightest needs, and every voice of salutation be tuned to such a
sweetness as if it whispered beside a dying mother's bed.
But you, Dolorosus,--you, to whom God gave youth and health, and who
might have kept them, the one long and the other perchance always, but
who never loved them, nor reverenced them, nor cherished them, only
coined them into money till they were all gone, and even the ill-gotten
treasure fell from your debilitated hands,--you, who shunned the
sunshine as if it were sin, and called all innocent recreation time
wasted,--you, who staid under ground in your goldmine, like the
sightless fishes of the Mammoth Cave, till you were as blind and
unjoyous as they,--what plea have you to make, what shelter to claim,
except that charity which suffereth long and is kind? We will strive
not to withhold it; while there is life, there is hope. At forty, it is
said, every man is a fool or a physician. We will wait and see which
vocation you select as your own, for the broken remnant of your days.
* * * * *
THE UTAH EXPEDITION:
ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES.
[Continued.]
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