Fellowship Author:Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EIGHTH LETTER. Many years' have now elapsed since the part called " Fellowship," which precedes these pages, was first given to the world. The interval is lon... more »g, but not on that account important. For there are ever-recurring events in this mortal life, and ever-fixed laws in the human heart on which Time makes little impression. We have mourning Sisters—as we have the Poor—always with us, who, like poor old Jacob at sight of Joseph's bloody coat, " refuse to be comforted "—this text being doubtless in the Patriarch's time the same that for countless generations it has since continued to be—a form of expression rather than a literal truth; for we cannot be said to refuse that which it is not in our power to accept. The truth is that there are certain sorrows in which none can really sympathise who have not experienced them. The imagination even can hardly be said to contribute its part here; for who can imagine a totally new sensation ? Youth cannot imagine old age. This is the real key—and it is only just to keep it in mind—to that absence of sympathy in which the mourner feels herself doubly isolated; and it is the key also to the lack of books which afford any comfort with understanding. Other forms of affliction—other heavy crosses—meet with a far deeper response. Most people can feel what the loss of sight, or hearing, or liberty implies; and imagination readily enhances the sense of such trials. For all people, generally speaking, are in the enjoyment of these blessings, and can in some measurerealize what the loss of them means. But the Cross we are called upon to bear; the divided life which perpetually reminds us of what the union has been ; the anguish which most of us are appointed to pass through—as all are appointed to pass through l)eath—alone—is what even the m...« less