ONE-SIDED ESTIMATE OF LIFE. 103 GRATITUDE A SOURCE OF RESIGNATION. JOB ii. 10. VERTAKEN with loss upon loss, sorrow upon sorrow, the man of Uz called to mind amid his calamities the redundance of bygone prosperity. Bygone it might be altogether; yet would he keep it gratefully in remembrance. Let not such bygones be bygones. This man had been in substance and success the greatest of all the men of the East. He was now in trouble, cast down very low, taking his session among the ashes, and scraping himself there with a potsherd. Yet his answers to the foolish woman, his wife, who urged him to repine and rebel, was the simple note of exclamation, What! should he receive good at the hand of God, and should he not receive evil? A clerical poet, not very long since taken from among us, thus refers to the habit men have of reckoning up their troubles much oftener than their mercies, and of failing to balance accounts in any account-taking of this sort: "Dials count sunbeams—man, each cloud that lowers: Say, hast thou numbered thy serener hours— Which often blessed thee, e'en in thine own way? Thou hast not. Evil makes a mighty noise, But Good is silent. Yet 'twere well to weigh Oh, yet reverse thy plan! Restore Life's equipoise!" The working out of that little sum in practice, in the practice of daily life, might make us practical arithmeticians to some purpose. The days of joy, observes Henry Mackenzie, are not more fleetly winged in their course than the days of sorrow; but we count not the moments of their duration with so scrupulous an exactness. In Hawthorne's suggestive allegory of the Christmas Banquet, the two trustees or stewards of the fund, to whom is entrusted the duty of inviting the guests, are described as "sombre humorists," who made it their principal occupation to number the sable threads in the web of human life, and drop all the golden ones out of the reckoning. Human nature, as Owen Feltham puts it, is more sensible of smart in suffering, than of pleasure in rejoicing, and "present endurances easily engross our thoughts. We cry out for a little pain; while we only smile for a great deal of contentment." The arithmetic of his quaint contemporary, “hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton," is not, nor ever has been, greatly in vogue, that whoever 66 has one good year in three, And merits not the good he has." That benign scholar of the old school, Doctor Harrison, in Fielding's ripest and humanest fiction, closes a long letter of admonition and advice to the Booths by one exhortation to this effect: "Do not, my dear children, fall into that fault which, the excellent Thucydides observes, is too common in human nature, to bear heavily the being deprived of the smaller good, without conceiving, at the same time, any gratitude for the much greater blessings which we are suffered to enjoy." Dr. Moore's Zeluco is at a loss to comprehend the philosophy of his reckless, easy-going, scampish acquaintance, Bertram, who takes his losses so quietly, or, indeed, complacently, the loss, for instance, of four hundred dollars being declared by him to have been "one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me," for it obliged him to pinch so hard to make it up, that he has thought himself in affluence ever since. Zeluco tells him he is a philosopher, and bears misfortunes with great fortitude. He has hardly any misfortunes to bear, Bertram replies. True, he has lost nearly seven thousand dollars in the space of a month. But he could never have had the misfortune to lose, if he had not first OF SORROW AND JOY. 105 That is his way of had the good fortune to win them. looking at the matter; and even a blackleg may point a moral. That is not the usual way, Zeluco hints, in which men calculate their own misfortunes. It is the fair way, however, rejoins Bertram; "for the most fortunate man that ever existed will be proved to be unfortunate if you throw out all the lucky incidents of his life, and leave the unlucky behind." Strange, in the superlative degree, must have been the life-long destiny, or strange, and strangely sombre, the disposition and temperament of him or her who can say, with the octogenarian duchess. in Shakspeare, "Eighty odd years of sorrow have I seen, And each hour's joy wrecked with a week of teen."* "After Ovid tells us ("Si numeres anno," etc.) that if we count the fine days and the cloudy ones throughout the year, we shall find that the sunny ones are in the majority. The keeping of a diary has been urged for this reason, among others, that it helps to prevent the diary-keeper from coming to believe himself an exceptional sufferer. The present worry or trouble that is weighing him down, seems to him of long standing; he believes his low spirits to date very far back, until, turning to his diary, he finds that only two days ago he was 66 merry as a cricket" with the friend that came to see him. heavy rain has fallen for four or five days, all persons who do not keep diaries invariably think that it has rained for a fortnight. If keen frosts last in winter for a fortnight, all persons without diaries have a vague belief that there has been frost for a month or six weeks.' Hazlitt somewhere observes, that if our hours were all serene, we might probably take as little note of them as the sun-dial does of those that are clouded. It is the shadow thrown across, he says, that gives us warning of their flight; otherwise, our impressions would take the same undistinguishable hue, and we should scarce be conscious of our existence. * Grief. Shelley once said to Leigh Hunt, during a walk together in the Strand, "Look at all these worn and miserable faces that we meet, and tell me what is to be thought of the world they appear in ?" His companion's reply was, "Ah, but these faces are not all worn with grief. You must take the wear and tear of pleasure into the account; of secret joys as well as sorrows." In Auerbach's picturesque story of Christian Gellert, we have a grumbling rustic, in Duben Forest, rising before daybreak from his bed to go out and brave wind and rain, and we overhear his repinings at his lot,-bitter murmurs at so wretched an existence, his broken rest by night, and by day a ceaseless round of strenuous toiling, while others fare so differently. But we see the weary woodman's wife cheerily light the fire and set about making ready her husband's porridge; and meanwhile he looks at a book lying open on the table, and this one verse in it he is fain to read again and again, till he has laid it to heart: "It is true," says the woodman softly to himself; and he adds aloud, "it's all there together, short and sweet." He takes off his cap, folds his hands, and repeats the words before eating his smoking porridge. His wife wonders at this grace. He calls the verse real God's words, and thinks they must be those of a saint of old. His wife tells him they are Gellert's, the great Professor, of Leipzig; and thereby hangs the tale of "Gellert's Last Christmas." To be counted by multitudes are they who turn away from the many blessings and compensations of their lot, "to dwell and brood upon its worries;" who, as it has been said, persistently look away from the numerous pleasant things they might contemplate, and look fixedly, and almost constantly, at painful and disagreeable things. "Every petty disagreeable in their lot is brought out, turned ingeniously in every possible light, and exaggerated to the highest degree." They seem to find a grim satisfaction in sticking the thorn in A SIMPLE SUM IN PRACTICE. 107 the hand further in; and although their lot has its innumerable blessings, at these they will not look. A homely moralist bids us try to define a worry, to measure its exact size, as a sure way to make it look smaller. He has great confidence in the power of the pen to give most people clearer ideas than they would have without it; accordingly, to one with a vague sense of a vast number of worries and annoyances in his lot, he recommends this course: to sit down, take a large sheet of paper and a pen, and write out a list of all his annoyances and worries. One so doing is assured that he will be surprised to find how few they are, and how small they look. “And if on another sheet of paper you make a list of all the blessings you enjoy, I believe that in most cases you will see reason to feel heartily ashamed of your previous state of discontent." The reminder is added, that even should the catalogue of worries not be a brief one, still the killing thing-the vague sense of indefinite magnitude and number—will be gone : almost all numbers diminish by accurately counting them. So, in fine, the simple sum in practice of which this chapter treats, is the counting off of blessings against troubles, the balancing of accounts between worries and comforts. A practical summing up may be found in the words of good old Gonzalo, to shipwrecked prince and peers on the desert land: 66 then wisely, good sir, weigh Our sorrow with our comfort." GIDEON'S THREE HUNDRED OUT OF THIRTY M TWO THOUSAND. JUDGES vii. 6. IDIAN was not to have it in her right to say that she had been subdued by a crushing force of overwhelming numbers, when Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, pitched the camp of Israel beside the well of Harod. The people he |