tortured, the silence of night maddened me. I sought forgetfulness in
travel, in wild adventure, in reckless dissipation. With that strange
fatality which often leads us to seek happiness or repose where we have
least chance of finding it, I, too, married. But I committed no
perjury. I offered friendship, and it sufficed. Love I never professed
to give, and the wife whom I merely esteemed had not the mental or the
magnetic ascendancy which might have triumphed for a time over the
image shrined in my inmost heart. I sought every avenue through which
I might fly from that and from myself. I tried mental occupation, and
explored literature and science, with feverish ardor and some reward. I
think it is Coleridge who recommends to those who are suffering from
extreme sorrow the study of a new language. But to a mind of deep
feeling diversion is not relief. If we fly from memory, we are pursued
and overtaken like fugitive slaves, and punished with redoubled
tortures. The only sure remedy for grief is self-evolved. We must
accept sorrow as a guest, not shun it as a foe, and, receiving it into
close companionship, let the mournful face haunt our daily paths, even
though it shut out all friends and dim the light of earth and heaven.
And when we have learned the lesson which it came to teach, the fearful
phantom brightens into beauty, and reveals an 'angel unawares,' who
gently leads us to heights of purer atmosphere and more extended
vision, and strengthens us for the battle which demands unfaltering
heart and hope.

"Do you remember the remark of the child Goethe, when his young reason
was perplexed by attempting to reconcile the terrible earthquake at
Lisbon with the idea of infinite goodness? 'God knows very well that an
immortal soul cannot suffer from mortal accident.' With similar faith
there came to me tranquil restoration. The deluge of passion rolled
back, and from the wreck of my Eden arose a new and more spiritual