death. At first, we cannot believe that it can happen to
us and to our love; or, if the thought comes to us, it is an event too
far in the future to ruffle the calm surface of our heart. And yet, it
must come; from it none can escape. Most can remember a night of
waiting, too stricken for prayer, too numb of heart even for feeling,
vaguely expecting the blow to strike us out of the dark. A strange
sense of the unreality of things came over us, when the black wave
submerged us and passed on. We went out into the sunshine, and it
seemed to mock us. We entered again among the busy ways of men, and
the roar of life beat upon our brain and heart,

Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,
One set slow bell will seem to toll,
The passing of the sweetest soul
That ever looked with human eyes.

Was it worth while to have linked our lives on to other lives, and laid
ourselves open to such desolation? Would it not be better to go
through the world, without joining ourselves too closely to the
fleeting bonds of other loves? Why deliberately add to our
disabilities? But it is not a disability; rather, the great purpose of
all our living is to learn love, even though we must experience the
pains of love as well as the joys. To cut ourselves off from this lot
of the human would be to impoverish our lives, and deprive ourselves of
the culture of the heart, which, if a man has not learned, he has
learned nothing. Whatever the risks to our happiness, we cannot stand
out from the lot of man, without ceasing to be men in the only true
sense.

It is not easy to solve the problem of sorrow. Indeed there is no
solution of it, unless the individual soul works out its own solution.
Most attempts at a philosophy of sorrow just end in high-sounding
words. Explanations, which profess to cover all the ground, are as
futile as the ordinary blundering attempts at comfort, which only charm
ache with sound and patch grief with proverbs. The sorrow of our
hearts is not appreciably lessened by argument. Any kind of
philosophy--any wordy explanation of the problem--is at the best poor
comfort. It is not the problem which brings the pain in the first
instance: it is the pain which brings the problem. The heart's
bitterness is not allayed by an exposition of the doctrine of
providence. Rachel who weeps for her children, the father whose little
daughter lies dead at home, are not to be appeased in their anguish by
a nicely-bala