beat against the impassable barriers! Where are we? What is this prison?
What is beyond? Oh for more air, more light! When will the door be
opened? The soul seems to itself to widen and deepen; it trembles at its
own dreadful forces; it gathers up in waves that break with wailing only
to flow back into the everlasting void. The calmest and most centred
natures are sometimes thrown by the shock of a great sorrow into a
tumultuous amazement. All things are changed. The earth no longer seems
solid, the skies no longer secure; a deep abyss seems underlying every
joyous scene of life. The soul, struck with this awful inspiration, is a
mournful Cassandra; she sees blood on every threshold, and shudders in
the midst of mirth and festival with the weight of a terrible wisdom.

Who shall dare be glad any more, that has once seen the frail
foundations on which love and joy are built? Our brighter hours, have
they only been weaving a network of agonizing remembrances for this day
of bereavement? The heart is pierced with every past joy, with every
hope of its ignorant prosperity. Behind every scale in music, the gayest
and cheeriest, the grandest, the most triumphant, lies its dark relative
minor; the notes are the same, but the change of a semitone changes all
to gloom;--all our gayest hours are tunes that have a modulation into
these dreary keys ever possible; at any moment the key-note may be
struck.

The firmest, best-prepared natures are often beside themselves with
astonishment and dismay, when they are called to this dread initiation.
They thought it a very happy world before,--a glorious universe. Now it
is darkened with the shadow of insoluble mysteries. Why this everlasting
tramp of inevitable laws on quivering life? If the wheels must roll, why
must the crushed be so living and sensitive?