Besides all our self-invoked aids of reason and
religion, nature's own provision for the need of our sorrows is
more bountiful and beneficent than we always perceive or
acknowledge. No one can go on living upon agony; we cannot grieve
for ever if we would, and our most strenuous efforts of
self-control derive help from the inevitable law of change, against
which we sometimes murmur and struggle as if it wronged our
consistency in sorrow and constancy in love. The tendency to _heal_
is as universal as the liability to _smart_. You always speak of
change with a sort of vague horror that surprises me. Though all
things round us are for ever shifting and altering, and though we
ourselves vary and change, there is a supreme spirit of
steadfastness in the midst of this huge unrest, and an abiding,
unshaken, immovable principle of good guiding this vanishing world
of fluctuating atoms, in whose eternal permanence of nature we
largely participate, and our tendency toward and aspiration for
whose perfect stability is one of the very causes of the progress,
and therefore mutability, of our existence.
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