No More Learning

I had dragged
it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make
it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.
What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper
to record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I
should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was,
all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of
so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Messages of sympathy reached me
from all who had still affection for me. Even people who had not known
me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote
to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me.
. . .

Three months go over. The calendar of my daily conduct and labour that
hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and sentence written
upon it, tells me that it is May. . . .

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in
fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.
There is
nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not
vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of
tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see
is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but
that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in
pain.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise
what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,--and
natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison
to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,--waited in the long
dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and
simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as,
handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven
for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode
of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or
stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single
word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment
whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a
thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it
in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that
I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept
sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been
profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of
those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my
mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed
for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and
brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the
wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.