Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."
This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling, soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[1] who attained no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them, like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones, whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell.
- ↑ There are three kinds of men. To some, a heaven is granted even on this earth; to others, a limbus patrum in which joy and sorrow reign equally; and, lastly, to some a hell in which grief predominates. Beings who have suffered for twenty years on the sick-bed of bodily pain, which is not, like mental sorrow, worn out by time, have certainly had more unhappiness than happiness, and, but for immortality, would be an eternal reproach to the highest moral being. And if there exists no such unhappy being, it is yet in the power of a tyrant to make one, on a clinical torture-bed, with the assistance of a physician and a philosopher. Such a one, at least, has a right to demand a future indemnity for his sufferings, because the Creator cannot have formed a creature to mourn more than it can rejoice.
Besides, though the object of our grief may seem but a deception in the eyes of the Eternal One, our grief itself cannot. Human suffering is also distinguished from brutish pain, because the animal only feels the wound, as we perhaps do in sleep, but it sees it not. Its pain is not trebled and increased by anticipation, recollection, and sensibility; it is an evanescent sting, and nothing more. Therefore tears were only given to human eyes.
