The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-04-10 00:00:00

HEART'S-EASE.

The following pleasant and instructive essay on "Heart's-
ease," which may be profitably read by old and young, is
from the Queen :

Shy of growth, heart's-ease is also easy of destruc-
tion. Envy and jealousy cut it down as a tender
annual is cut down by the frost; pride, which puts
itself voluntarily in the way of being wounded because
of its aggressive assumptions to which men who respect
themselves cannot submit; vanity, always hungry,
never filled; and ambition, which is just as insatiable
—the supreme point receding as one height after
another is marked, made for and gained; the uneasy
temper which a breath provokes, a look inflames; the
inborn opposition which sets itself athwart the cur-
rent, simply because it is the current and runs one
way; the obstinate perversity of method which will
not wade in the shallows nor swim iu the depths ;—ail
these are qualities side by side with which no heart's-
ease is to be found, and whereon not the most generous
husbandry of good fortune can make it grow. Give
any one with these qualities money, fame, position,
fortune, all the goods which the earth-god has in his
lap, and he will still go about the world gloomy and
disappointed—a man whose heart is never at ease,
because always craving for what it has not got, and
always dissatisfied with what it has; a Prometheus
sentenced to pain for no grandeur of revolt against
unjust power, but for the mere weak yielding to self-
torture of one whose own nature is its own vulture.
And what about sorrow? Ah ! it must be confessed
that sorrow is an unconquerable foe to this delicate
and fragile plant! Bring what we may of manly for-
titude, and that gentler sister, resignation, to bear
worthily the griefs with which we have been afflicted,
they still remain as the worm which dieth not and the
fire that is never quenched, gnawing for ever at the
root of joy, consuming to the end of time all freshness
and luxuriance, all flowers and all fruits. It is of no
use to preach patience under certain sorrows, or to
drone over the healing properties of time to those
whose wounds are agape and bleeding. There are
some griefs which no patience can diminish, and the
scars of which no length of time can heal. When
your beloved child dies, even religion fails to give
you more than that cold pale stillness of patience
which accepts with bowed head the decree of the in-
evitable; and the oft-repeated formula that the thing
you loved is better off there where it is than when it was
with you, sounds hollow of comfort to the broken-
hearted mother—the Rachel mourning for her children
because they are not. Nor can you have true heart's-
ease when the creature you love best of all in life is
lying tortured by pain or prostrate by disease • when
it is unhappy, bruised in heart, and mishandled by a
cruel fate. You cannot dissociate yourself from your
love so far as not to feel sorrow when your love feels
pain, and how can heart's-ease exist then? Indeed,
strength of emotion ia at all times incompatible with
true heart's-ease; and sympathy with the sorrows of
others digs deep channels of sorrow through one's own
life. Still, so far as that goes, the heart's-ease that is
bought by deadness to the pains and griefs of
our friends and neighbours is a product of egoism by
no means to be envied or cultivated; and we do
better to lose our own supreme serenity that we may
sympathise with others, and draw the bonds of brother-
hood, the cords of a common humanity, close and firm.

Setting aside then the one circumstance of grief
through the emotions whether directly as a sorrow
touching our immediate selves, or indirectly as a sorrow
voluntarily accepted through the divine partition, the
tender participation of sympathy, we do not find that
true heart's-ease is either produced or destroyed by
outward circumstances ; and we do find that it is a
thing substantially endogenous, growing from within,
not without, and due to the nature of the person, not
to the character of his actualities. It is the product
partly of original temperament and partly of acquired
self-discipline; but it must never be forgotten that the
acquired self-discipline is a stronger agent than the
original temperament, and, given brains of normal
power and a body free from actual misleading disease,
one which we can all call into active being if we will.
Heart's-ease is found with contented people, that
is, people who take the rough things of life equally
with the smooth, and who, when the ways are more
rough than smooth and the evil predominates over
the good, are still content to waste no strength in
murmurs and never to hit out blindly in wild re-
proaches. Maybe they are eager enough to alter
those things which are uncongenial; but until they
can alter them they bear what they do not like with
pleasantness of temper and heartsomeness of courage,
with sweetness and with grace. They have the wit to
recognise what can and what cannot be changed. What
they can change they do, and what they cannot they
bear. Is not this a sort of heart's-ease worth cultivating?
But if to the impatient, querulous, undisciplined folks
who spend their strength in complaining of the
crosses they must bear and bemoaning the desires
they must forego, you speak of the dignity and the com-
fort to be found in content, in all probability they take
you to mean wooden-headed supineness, and tell you
with more or less of vehemence that you have mistaken
your quarry, and such a soulless system of indifference
is not for them. They feel, they say, mistaking peevish-
ness for sensitiveness ' • they are not like beasts to bear
their burden without groaning—creatures of hide so
tough it feels neither cord nor whip, neither weight of
chain nor prick of spur. So you have to leave them,
despising the means by which heart's-ease may be
cultivated, preferring to destroy with acid rather than
to preserve with honey, and to chafe their shoulders
sore rather than to bear their burden featly.
What contentment can do in its own way, so also
can diligence and theunwearied performance of duty.
Few things help more towards true heart's-ease than
keeping the mind employed, and all our duties on the
right side of the great day-book of life. No one can
have heart's-ease whose duties are lying in a unordered
mass at his feet, and those things left undone which it
is his special business to do. Pleasures are all very
delightful while they are going on, but when they are
over we have no solid residinim left; save, perhaps, in
the coil created by those duties left unfulfilled which
ought to have been done while we were amusing our=
selves, and by the neglect of which we are hounded,
and others are hindered for days after. And what
heart's-ease can there be when-we are assailed with

reproaches from without and full of self-reproaches
within? when we have not a smooth inch of rope left
for the running, but only a mass of knots and kinks,
all made by ourselves, and some of which we can
never undo?