Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 July 1875 — GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. [ARTICLE]

GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “ JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN.” How many lives are, so to speak, mere relics of an ended feast, fragments which may be either left to waste or be taken up andmade the most of! For we cannot die just when we wish it and because we wish it. The fact may be very unromantic, but it is a fact, that a too large dinner or a false step on the stairs kills much more easily than a great sorrow. Nature compels us to live on, even with broken hearts, as with lopped-off members. True, we are never quite the same again, never the complete human being; but we may still be a very respectable, healthy human being, capable of living out our threescore years and ten with tolerable comfort after all. These “ fragments” of lives, how they strew our daily path on every side! Not a house do we enter, not a company do we mix with, but we more than guess—we know —that these our friends, men and women, who go about the world doing their work and taking their pleasure therein, all carry about them a secret burden—of bitter disappointments, vanished hopes, unfulfilled ambitions, lost loves. Probably every one of them, when his or her smiling face vanishes from the circle, will change it into serious, anxious, sad—happy if it be only sad, with no mingling of either bitterness or badness. That complete felicity which the young believe in and expect almost as a matter of certainty to come never does come. Soon or late we have to make up our minds to do without it, to take up the fragments of our blessings, thankfill that we have what we have and are what we are; above all that we have our own burden to bear and not our neighbor’s. But whatever it is we must bear it alone; and this gathering up of fragments which I am so earnestly advising is also a thing which must be done alone.

The lesson is sometimes learned very early. It is shrewdly said: “At three we love our mothers, at six our fathers, at twelve our holidays, at twenty our sweethearts, at thirty our wives, at forty our children, at fifty ourselves." Still, in one form or other, love is the groundwork of our existence. So at least thinks the passionate boy or sentimental girl who has fallen under its influence. For I suppose we must all concede the every-day fact that most people fall in love some time or other, and that a good many do it even in their teens. You may call it “calf love,” and so it often is, and comes to the salutary end of such a passion— Which does at once, like paper set on fire, Burn—and expire. But it gives a certain amount of pain and discomfort during the conflagration, and often leaves an ugly little heap of ashes behind. Also, it is well to be cautious, as the foolishest of fancies may develop into a real love—the blessing or curse of a lifetime.

“Fond of her?” I heard an old man once answer, as he stood watching his wife move slowly down their beautiful but rather lonely garden—they had buried eight of their nine children, and the ninth was going to be married that spring—fond of her?” with a gentle smile; “why, I’ve been fond of her these fifty years!” But such cases are very exceptional. It seldom that one love—a happy loverruns like a golden thread through the life of either man or woman that we ought to be patient even with the most frantic boy or forlorn girl who has “fallen in love” and is enduring its first sharp pleasure, or pain, for both are much alike. When they come and tell you that their hearts are broken, it is best not to laugh at them, but to help them to “ gather up the fragments” as soon as possible. At first, of course, they will not agree that it is possible. “This or nothing!” is the despairing cry; and though we may hint that the world is wide, and there may be in it other people at least its good as the one particular idol, still we cannot expect them to believe it. Disappointed lovers would think it treason against love to suppose that life is to be henceforward

1 anything than a total blank. It is so sometimes, Heaven knows! I confess to being one of those few who in this age dare still to believe in love, and in its awful influence for good or tor evil, at the very outset of life. But it is not the whole of life—nor ought to be. The prevention of a so-called “ imprudent” marriage—namely, an impecunious one—and the forcing on of another which had nothing in the world to recommend it except money has often been the ultimate ruin of a young man, who would have been a good man had he been a happy man, had he married the girl he loved. And in instances too numerous to count have girls—through the common but contemptible weakness of not knowing their own minds, or the worse than weakness of being governed by the minds of others in so exclusively a personal matter as marriage—driven honest fellows into vice, or else into some reckless, hasty union, whereby both the man himself and the poor wife, whom he never loved but only married, were made miserable for life. Generally speaking men get over their love-sorrows much easier than women—naturally, because life has for them many other things besides love, for women almost nothing. But still one does find oc. casionally a man prosperous and happy, kind to his wife, and devoted to his children, in whom the indelible trace of some early disappointment is that one name is never mentioned, one set of associations entirely put aside. He is a good fellow — a cheerful fellow too; he has taken up the fragments of his life and made the very best of them. Yet sometimes you feel that the life would have been more complete, the character more nobly developed, if the man had had his heart’s desire and married his first love. Which nobody does, they say; certainly almost nobody; yet the world wags on and everybody seems satisfied, at least in public; nay, possibly in private too, for time has such infinite power for healing or hiding. There is nothing harder than a lava stream grown cold. Those of us who have reached middle age without dropping—who would ever drop ?—the ties of our youth move about encircled by dozens of such secret histories, forgotten by the outside world — half forgotten, perhaps, by the very actors therein —with whom we, the spectators, had once such deep sympathy. Now we sometimes turn and look at a face which we remember as a young face, alive with all the passion of youth, and we marvel to see how commonplace it has grown—reddening cozily over a good dinner, or sharp and eager over business greed; worn and wrinkled with nursery cares, or sweetly smiling in a grand drawing-room, ready to play its petty part, With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart: a sort of gathering up of fragments which those who are weak enough or strong enough still to believe in love will think far worse than any scattering. The young will not believe us when we tell them that their broken hearts may be mended—ought to be, since life is too precious a thing to be wasted over any one woman, or man either. It is given us to be made the most of, and this whether we ourselves are happy or miserable. The misery will not last; the happiness will, if only in remembrance. No pure joy, however fleeting, contains any real bitterness, even when it is gone by. But time only will teach this. At first there is nothing so overwhelming as the despair of youth, which sees neither before it nor behind; refuses to be laughed out of, or preached out of, its cherished woe, which it deems a matter of conscience to believe eternal.

It will not be eternal; but best not to say so to the sufferer. Best to attempt neither argument nor consolation, only substitution. • Hard work, close study, a sudden plunge into the serious business of life, that the victim may find the world contains other things besides love, is the wisest course to be suggested by those long-suffering, much-abused beings, parents and guardians. Love is the best thing—few deny that; but life contains many supplementary blessings too; honorable ambition, leading to a suceess well earned and well used, to say nothing of that calm strength which comes into a y9ung man’s heart when he has fought with and conquered fate by first conquering himself, the most fatal fate of all. . Commonplace preaching this! Everybody has heard it. Strange how seldom anybody thinks of acting upon itt In the temporary madness of disappointment a poor fellow will go and wreck his whole future, and when afterward he would fain build up a new life, alas! there is no material left to build with.

Therefore it is the duty of those older and wiser, who, perhaps, themselves have waded through the black river and landed safe on the opposite shore, to show him that it is not as deep as it seems and that it has an opposite shore. He may swim through with the aid of a stout heart and an honest self-respect—self-respect, not selfishness—for the most selfish creature alive is a young man in love, except toward the young woman he happens to be in love with. Not seldom the very best lesson of life—bitter but wholesome—is taught to a young man by a love disappointment. Not so with women, they being in this matter passive not active agents. So few girls are “in love” nowadays, so many set upon merely getting married, that I confess to a secret respect for any heart which has in it the capacity of being “ broken.” Not that it does break unless the victim is too feeble physically to fight against her mental suffering; but the anguish is sore at the time. There is no cure for it except one, suggested by a little girl I

know, who, with the. innocent passion of six and a half, adored a certain “beautiful Charlie” of nineteen. Some one suggested that Charlie would marry and cease to care for her. “ Then I should be so unhappy,” sighed the sad little voice. “ What if he married a wife he was very fond of, and who made him quite happy—would you be unhappy then? “No,” was the answer, given after a slight pause, which showed this conclusion was not come to without thought—“no, I would love his wife, that’s all.” The poor little maid had jumped by instinct, womanly instinct, to the true secret of faithful love—the love which desires, above all, the good of the beloved, and therefore learns to be brave enough to look at happiness through another’s eyes. This is the only way by which any girl can take up the fragments of a lost or unrequited affection; by teaching herself, not to forget it—that is impossible—but to rise above it until the sting is taken out of her sorrow and it becomes gradually transformed from a slow poison into a bitter but wholesome food. Besides, though the suggestion may seem far below the attention of poetical people, there are such things as fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and other not undeserving relations, to whom a tithe of the affection wasted upon some (possibly) only half-deserving young man would be a pnceless boon. And so long as the world endures there will always be abundance of helpless, sick and sorrowful people calling on the sorrow-stricken one for aid, and ready to pay her back for all she condescends to give with that grateful affection which heals a wounded heart better than anything—except work. Work! work! work! That is the grand panacea for sorrow, and, mercifully, there is no end of work to be done m this world, if anybody will do it. Few households are so perfect in their happy self-contain-edness that they are not glad, oftentimes, of the help of some lonely woman, to whom they also supply the sacred consolation of being able to help somebody, and thus, perhaps, save herfrom throwing herself blindly into some foolish career for which she has no real vocation, except that forced upon her by the sickly fancy of sorrow; for neither art, nor science, nor religion will really repay its votaries if they take to it, like opium-eaters, merely to deaden despair. Say what you will, and pity them as you may, these broken hearts are exceedingly troublesome to the rest of the world. We do not like .to see our relatives and friends going about with melancholy faces, perpetually weeping over the unburied corpse of some hopeless grief or unpardonable wrong. We had much rather they buried it quietly and allowed us, after a due season of sympathy, to go on our way. Most of us prefer to be comfortable if we can. I havC always found those the best-liked people who have strength to bear their sorrows themselves, without troubling their neighbors. And the sight of all others most-touching, most ennobling, is that of a man or woman whom we know to have suffered, perhaps to be suffering still, yet who still carries a cheerful face, is a burden to no friend, nor casts a shadow over any household—perhaps quite the contrary. Those whose own light is quenched are often the lightbringers. To accept the inevitable; neither to struggle against-it nor murmur at it, simply to bear it —this is the great lesson of life, above all to a woman. It may come late or early, and the learning of it is sure to be hard, but she will never be a really happy woman until she has learned it I have always thought two of the most pathetic pictures of women’s lives ever given are Tennyson’s “ Dora:”

As time Went onward, Mary took another mate; But Dora lived unmarried to her death; and Jeanie, in • Auld Robin Gray,” who says, with the grave simplicity of a Godfearing Scotswoman: I daurna think"o’ Jamie, for that wad be a sin; r So I will do ray best a gude wife to be. For Auld Robin Gray is vera kind to me. Besides lost loves, common to both men and women, there are griefs which belong perhaps to men only—lost ambitions. It is very sore for a man just touching, or having just passed, middle age slowly to find out that he, has failed in the promise of his youth; failed in everything—aspirations, hopes, actions; a man of whom strangers charitably say: “ Poor fellow, there’s a screw loose somewhere; he’ll never get on in the world.” And even his nearest friends begin mournfully to believe this; they cease to hope, and content themselves in finding palliatives for a sort of patient despair. That “ loose screw”—Heaven knows what it is, or whether he himself is aware of it or not —always seems to prevent his succeeding in anything; or else, without any fault of his own, circumstances have made him the wrong man in the wrong place, and it is too late now to get out of it. Pride and shame alike keep him silent; yet he knows—and his friends know, and he knows they know it—that his career has been, and always will be, a dead failure; that the only thing left for him is to gather up the fragments of his vanished dreams, his lost ambitions, his wasted labors, and go on patiently to the end. He does so, working away at a business which he hates, or pursuing sn art which he is conscious he has no talent for, or bound hand and foot in a mesh of circumstances against which he has not energy enough to struggle. Whatever form of destiny may have swamped him, he is swamped, and for life. Yet even in a case like this, and there are few sadder, lies a certain consolation. People prate about heroes, but one sometimes sees asimplp, commonplace man,with nothing either grand or clever about him,

who, did wc only know it, is more worthy the name of hero than many a conqueror of a city. Ay, though all the dream-pal-aces of his youth may have crumbled down, or, like the Arabs, he may have to build and live, in a poor little hut under the ruins of temples that might have been. But One beyond us all knows the story of this pathetic “ might-have-been,” and has pity upon it—the pity that, unlike man’s, wounds not, only strengthens and heals.— Harper's Basar.