The Upton Letters eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 268 pages of information about The Upton Letters.

The Upton Letters eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 268 pages of information about The Upton Letters.
to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all alive with ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the oppressive clumsiness of nightmare.  But you are not inexperienced or weak.  You have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood thaws, and the old thrill comes back.  That is one of the real compensations of middle age.  When one is young, one imagines that any depression will be continuous; and one sees the dreary, uncomforted road winding ahead over bare hills, till it falls to the dark valley.  But later on one can believe that “the roadside dells of rest” are there, even if one cannot see them; and, after all, you have a home which goes with you; and it would seem to be fortunate, or to speak more truly, tenderly prepared, that you have only daughters—­a son, who would have to go back to England to be educated, would be a source of anxiety.  Yet I find myself even wishing that you had a son, that I might have the care of him over here.  You don’t know the heart-hunger I sometimes have for young things of my own to watch over; to try to guard their happiness.  You would say that I had plenty of opportunities in my profession; it is true in a sense, and I think I am perhaps a better schoolmaster for being unmarried.  But these boys are not one’s own; they drift away; they come back dutifully and affectionately to talk to their old tutor; and we are both of us painfully conscious that we have lost hold of the thread, and that the nearness of the tie that once existed exists no more.

Well, I did not mean in this letter to begin bemoaning my own sorrows, but rather to try and help you to bear your own.  Tell me as soon as you can what your plans are, and I will come down and see you for the last time under the old conditions; perhaps the new will be happier.  God bless you, my old friend!  Perhaps the light which has hitherto shone (though fitfully) on your life will now begin to shine through it instead; and let me add one word.  My assurance grows firmer, from day to day, that we are in stronger hands than our own.  It is true that I see things in other lives which look as if those hands were wantonly cruel, hard, unloving; but I reflect that I cannot see all the conditions; I can only humbly fall back upon my own experience, and testify that even the most daunting and humiliating things have a purifying effect; and I can perceive enough at all events to encourage me to send my heart a little farther than my eyes, and to believe that a deep and urgent love is there.—­Ever affectionately yours,

T. B.

Upton,
Jan. 26, 1904.

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The Upton Letters from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.