The Clergyman's Wife and Other Sketches/Black Days
BLACK DAYS.
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ave you ever known days that were H black? Have you ever known days in which everything went wrong, as though some invisible hand turned your whole life topsy-turvy? Did you ever get up in the morning after the manner which the juveniles style "wrong side foremost"? Did you stub your toes with the first_ step you took? Did your strings tangle themselves into Gordian knots, your buttons fly off like rockets, your hooks mysteriously vanish, just when you were in the greatest hurry? Did glass and china break spontaneously beneath your most careful touch? Did the dress you fancied short, magically lengthen itself to make you stumble? Did every sharp instrument you handled, pierce or cut you, of its own accord? Did some undiscoverable individual throw your neatly-arranged work into confusion, and abstract the book in which you were deeply interested? Did the pen spatter, and scratch, and obstinately blot the paper, when you attempted to write? Did the current of your thoughts, which usually flowed with pleasant freedom, suddenly become stagnant? Did the persons you least wished to see, force themselves into your presence, and those you loved best remain absent? Did you labor with more than wonted zeal, yet accomplish nothing? Did it seem as though some evil genius walked in your steps, and flung stones in your path, and turned all your actions awry, and made all your efforts failures, until you grew crosser and crosser, and became quite unbearable to yourself, to say nothing of being unendurable to others? With your equilibrium destroyed, all your purposes defeated, your spirits not dampened merely, but drowned, did you not emphatically call the day black?
Such unbalanced days, when life seems all a game of cross purposes, will come to most of us, and how is their unholy spell to be broken? Truly a momentous question! Very often the presence of some being gifted with a strong heart, genial temperament, and sympathetic nature, will chase all the shadows, restore serenity to the ruffled temper, and evoke order out of confusion,—even as the voice, the look, of one single angel can put to flight a legion of evil spirits. But it is not always that visitants, happily endowed with this calming, cheering, demon-exorcising power, enter in, and tinge our overhanging clouds with the splendor of their own internal sunshine.
Oftener, far, if we would not succumb to the depressing influences that weigh upon us in these black days, we must valiantly take up arms ourselves to war against the invisible enemy. If, in the midst of the labor that is proving futile—the duty that we are illy performing—the annoyances that are goading us with needles, we could only be induced to pause and ponder, and look our own mood steadily in the face, we might gain a speedy victory over a host of these Liliputian tormentors.
A state of gloom is always an unthankful, ungodly state. Sometimes it is produced by some physical derangement; sometimes it springs out of some hidden discontent, some haunting disappointment, some foreboding of menacing misfortune, and sometimes it is untraceable to any source. If its origin be physical, is it not incumbent upon us to use every attainable means to restore the health of the body, that the sanitary tone of the mind may return? If discontent or disappointment have thrown this sable pall over the spirit, will it not be lifted by the remembrance that all events in life are Heaven-ordered, and no apparent failure or sorrow is permitted that cannot become an instrument of spiritual advancement? If the black day's heaviness proceed from some threatening evil, will it not be dispelled by the reflection that it is folly to suffer in anticipation the anguish of an affliction which we may possibly be spared? If the incapacitating depression have no traceable origin, will not the dusky phantom vanish when brought before the bar of Common Sense?
Could we only force ourselves to remember that a day full of these contrarieties is a day wasted, and will leave a page, dark as our own gloom, upon that life-chronicle, to every leaf of which angel fingers will point, every line of which we must read in the hereafter, before we take the places prepared for us, or rather, which we are daily preparing for ourselves—could we only remember this, the weakest of us would find strength to shake off the incubus, and no black day, however gloomily it began, would end in darkness.
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