第6章 INTRODUCTION(5)

A few years hater I lived over the life of another friend in writing a Memoir of which he was the subject.I saw him,the beautiful,bright-eyed boy,with dark,waving hair;the youthful scholar,first at Harvard,then at Gottingen and Berlin,the friend and companion of Bismarck;the young author,making a dash for renown as a novelist,and showing the elements which made his failures the promise of success in a larger field of literary labor;the delving historian,burying his fresh young manhood in the dusty alcoves of silent libraries,to come forth in the face of Europe and America as one of the leading historians of the time;the diplomatist,accomplished,of captivating presence and manners,an ardent American,and in the time of trial an impassioned and eloquent advocate of the cause of freedom;reaching at last the summit of his ambition as minister at the Court of Saint James.All this I seemed to share with him as Itracked his career from his birthplace in Dorchester,and the house in Walnut Street where he passed his boyhood,to the palaces of Vienna and London.And then the cruel blow which struck him from the place he adorned;the great sorrow that darkened his later years;the invasion of illness,a threat that warned of danger,and after a period of invalidism,during a part of which I shared his most intimate daily life,the sudden,hardly unwelcome,final summons.

Did not my own consciousness migrate,or seem,at least,to transfer itself into this brilliant life history,as I traced its glowing record?I,too,seemed to feel the delight of carrying with me,as if they were my own,the charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere.I shared his heroic toils,I partook of his literary and social triumphs,I was honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about him,I was wronged by the indignity from which he suffered,mourned with him in his sorrow,and thus,after I had been living for months with his memory,I felt as if Ishould carry a part of his being with me so long as my self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.

The years passed away,and the influences derived from the companionships I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own current of being.Then there came to me a new experience in my relations with an eminent member of the medical profession,whom Imet habitually for a long period,and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a prelude to a work of his own,written under very peculiar circumstances.He was the subject of a slow,torturing,malignant,and almost necessarily fatal disease.Knowing well that the mind would feed upon itself if it were not supplied with food from without,he determined to write a treatise on a subject which had greatly interested him,and which would oblige him to bestow much of his time and thought upon it,if indeed he could hold out to finish the work.During the period while he was engaged in writing it,his wife,who had seemed in perfect health,died suddenly of pneumonia.Physical suffering,mental distress,the prospect of death at a near,if uncertain,time always before him,it was hard to conceive a more terrible strain than that which he had to endure.

When,in the hour of his greatest need,his faithful companion,the wife of many years of happy union,whose hand had smoothed his pillow,whose voice had consoled and cheered him,was torn from him after a few days of illness,I felt that my,friend's trial was such that the cry of the man of many afflictions and temptations might well have escaped from his lips:"I was at ease,but he hath broken me asunder;he hath also taken me by my neck and shaken me to pieces,and set me up for his mark.His archers compass me round about,he cleaveth my reins asunder,and doth not spare;he poureth out my gall upon the ground."I had dreaded meeting him for the first time after this crushing blow.What a lesson he gave me of patience under sufferings which the fearful description of the Eastern poet does not picture too vividly!We have been taught to admire the calm philosophy of Haller,watching his faltering pulse as he lay dying;we have heard the words of pious resignation said to have been uttered with his last breath by Addison:but here was a trial,not of hours,or days,or weeks,but of months,even years,of cruel pain,and in the midst of its thick darkness the light of love,which had burned steadily at his bedside,was suddenly extinguished.

There were times in which the thought would force itself upon my consciousness,How long is the universe to look upon this dreadful experiment of a malarious planet,with its unmeasurable freight of suffering,its poisonous atmosphere,so sweet to breathe,so sure to kill in a few scores of years at farthest,and its heart-breaking woes which make even that brief space of time an eternity?There can be but one answer that will meet this terrible question,which must arise in every thinking nature that would fain "justify the ways of God to men."So must it be until that "one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves"has become a reality,and the anthem in which there is no discordant note shall be joined by a voice from every life made "perfect through sufferings."Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years of companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend,in retracing which I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.

And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of intimacy with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than while he was here in living form and feature.I did not know how difficult a task I had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man whom all,or almost all,agree upon as one of the great lights of the New World,and whom very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah.

Never before was I so forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of the work of a newspaper editor,--that threshing of straw already thrice beaten by the flails of other laborers in the same field.