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2—THE DARK WOOD—ILLUMINATED
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WE need the Wine that maketh glad the heart of man and the Bread which strengtheneth man’s heart as we begin our journey. The way is as various as this world of ours, this outer world that is “the pictured scroll of worlds within the soul,” and sooner than we expected to see it, a dark wood crosses our path, and seems to forbid us to go on. And sometimes we forget immediately to look up to the light that pours into the wood from high above the trees, making it far more radiant than it is dark.
The clouding of the inward man which often follows accident, or illness, may be like a very dark wood. It can be strangely dulling and subduing to wake up to another day that must be spent between walls and under a roof; and a body that is cumbered by little pains—pains too small to presume to knock at the door of heaven, but not too small to wish they might—can sadly cramp the soul, unless it finds a way entirely to forget itself. Or the trouble may be the loss of means; poverty can be a darkness. The heavy overshadowing of bereavement is a very dark wood. (“Always wishing to consult one who is not here, groping by myself, with a constant sense of desolation,” as Queen Victoria in the days of her early widowhood said piteously to Dean Stanley, whom she could trust to understand.) At such a time the miles that lie before us may appear one long night, without the companionship which made the twelve months of the year like the twelve gates of the City, each several month a pearl.
The partings of the nursery—we have all known them:
Here a pretty baby lies
Sung asleep with lullabies:
Pray he silent and not stir
Th’ easy earth that covers her.
The old words are new somewhere every day. And there are those partings like that of the poet and his “Dear Son Gervase, whose winning love to me was like a friendship, far above the course of nature or his tender years.” (For Gervase was only seven.) Father and little son have been together for three hundred years, and the pain of parting has long ago been blotted out; but in many a home there is a raw, red wound, and the healing of that wound seems very far away.
There are darker woods than illness, poverty, bereavement. There is the gloom wrapped about every thought of some catastrophe that has shaken the fabric of life to its foundations. There has not yet been full recovery from that shock. Broken hearts are everywhere in this world of tragedies: “How many there are, like the king in Samaria, wearing hidden sackcloth. Outside, the gay purple robe which, rent, reveals the secret. The people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth within upon his flesh.”