et grief and
disaster. We must not consecrate a shrine to sorrow and make the
votive altar, as Dido did, into a _causa doloris_, an excuse for
lamentation. We must not think it an honourable and chivalrous and
noble thing to spend our time in broken-hearted solemnity in the
vaults of perished joys. Or if we do it, we must frankly confess it to
be a weakness and a languor of spirit, not believe it to be a thing
which others ought to admire and respect. It was one of the base
sentimentalities of the last century, a real sign of the decadence of
life, that people felt it to be a fine thing to cherish grief, and to
live resolutely with sighs and tears. The helpless widow of
nineteenth-century fiction, shrouded in crape, and bursting into tears
at the smallest sign of gaiety, was a wholly unlovely, affected,
dramatic affair. And one of the surest signs of our present vitality
is that this attitude has become not only unusual, but frankly absurd
and unfashionable. There is an intense and gallant pathos about a
nature broken by sorrow, making desperate attempts to be cheerful and
active, and not to cast a shadow of grief upon others. There is no
pathos at all in the sight of a person bent on emphasising his or her
grief, on using it to make others uncomfortable, on extracting a
recognition of its loyalty and fidelity and emotional fervour.

Of course there are some memories and experiences that must grave a
deep and terrible mark upon the heart, the shock of which has been so
severe, that the current of life must necessarily be altered by them.
But even then it is better as far as possible to forget them and to
put them away from us--at all events, not to indulge them or dwell in
them. To yield is simply to delay the pilgrimage, to fall exhausted in
some unhappy arbour by the road. The road has to be travelled, every
inch of it, and it is better to struggle on in feebleness than to
collapse in despair.

Mrs. Charles Kingsley, in her widowhood, once said to a friend,
"Whenever I find myself thinking too much about Charles, I simply
force myself to read the most exciting novel I can. He is there, he is
waiting for me; and hearts were made to love with, not to break."

And as the years go on, even the most terrible memories grow to have
the grace and beauty which nature lavishes on all the relics of
extinct forces and spent agonies. They become like the old grey broken
castle, with the grasses on its ledges, and the crows nest