unfit for the age in which it is our privilege to move.
Sometimes it needs Death to show us ourselves and to teach our friends
our deep and unsuspected kindness.

The woman who hungers throughout her marriage for the daily expression
of her husband's love, often looks longingly towards the day to come,
when hot tears will fall upon her upturned face and that for which she
has vainly thirsted will be laid upon her silent lips. But swiftly upon
the vision comes the thought, that even so, it would be of short
duration; that the newly awakened love would soon be the portion of
someone else.

It would be a beautiful world, indeed, if we were not at such pains to
hide our real selves--if all our kindly thoughts were spoken and all our
generous deeds were done. No one of us would think of Death as our best
friend, if we were not all so bitterly unkind. Yet we put into white
fingers the roses for which the living might have pleaded in vain, and
too often, with streaming eyes, we ask pardon of the dead.

[Sidenote: Atonement]

Atonement is not to be made thus. A costly monument in a public square
is tardy appreciation of a genius whose generation refused him bread. A
man's tears upon a woman's hands are not enough, when all her life she
has prayed for his love.

There is no law so unrelenting as that of compensation. Gravitation
itself may be more successfully defied. It is the one thing which is
absolutely just and which is universal in its action, though sometimes
as slow as the majestic forces which change rock to dust.

We cannot have more joy than we give--nor more pain. The eternal balance
swings true. The capacity for enjoyment and the capacity for suffering
are one and the same. He who lives out of reach of sorrow has sacrificed
his possible ecstasy. "He has seen only half the universe who has not
been shown the House of Pain."

[Sidenote: Emerson's "Compensation"]

"And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation,
a cruel disappointment, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid
loss and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force
that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother,
lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the
aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our
way of life, terminating an epoch of infancy or youth which was wait