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.