Chapter VI

The "common" expressions of sympathy with our trouble are very "commonplace"--

"Vacant chaff well-meant for grain."

A friend asks, "Why grieve?" "Other friends remain;" "Loss is common to the race;" as Hamlet's mother says, "All that live must die." Is this comfort? rather the contrary. We know it is so--

"Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break."

The father drinks his son's health at the war, in the moment when that son is shot.

The mother prays for her sailor-boy when

"His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave."

The girl is dressing before the glass, and strives to array herself most becomingly for her expected lover; and he meanwhile is either drowned in the ford, or killed by a fall from his horse--

"O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend."

These were all as unconscious of disaster as was the Poet, who, "to please him well," was writing to Hallam in the very hour that he died.

There is a fine passage in Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Dying," which contains a like rumination on the uncertainty of life.

"The wild fellow in _Petronius_ that escaped upon a broken table from
the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon the rocky
shore, espied a man rolled upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted
with sand in the folds of his garments, and carried by his civil enemy
the sea towards the shore to find a grave; and it cast him into some
sad thoughts; that peradventure this man's wife in some part of the
Continent, safe and warm, looks next month for the good man's return;
or it may be his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father
thinks of that affectionate kiss which still is warm upon the good old
man's cheek ever since he took a kind farewell, and he weeps with joy
to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the
circle of his father's arms.

"These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of all
their designs; a dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a
broken cable, an hard rock and a rough wind dashed in pieces the
fortune of a whole family, and they that shall weep loudest for the
accident, are not yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered
shipwreck."