But the doubts had exerted, probably,
but little influence on his happiness till the sudden stroke of loss
made life for a time seem almost unbearable unless the doubts were
solved. They WERE solved, or stoically set aside, in the Ulysses,
written in the freshness of grief, with the conclusion that we must
be
"Strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
But the gnawing of grief till it becomes a physical pain, the fever
fits of sorrow, the aching desiderium, bring back in many guises the
old questions. These require new attempts at answers, and are
answered, "the sad mechanic exercise" of verse allaying the pain.
This is the genesis of In Memoriam, not originally written for
publication but produced at last as a monument to friendship, and as
a book of consolation.
No books of consolation can console except by sympathy; and in In
Memoriam sympathy and relief have been found, and will be found, by
many. Another, we feel, has trodden our dark and stony path, has
been shadowed by the shapes of dread which haunt our valley of
tribulation: a mind almost infinitely greater than ours has been our
fellow-sufferer. He has emerged from the darkness of the shadow of
death into the light, whither, as it seems to us, we can scarcely
hope to come. It is the sympathy and the example, I think, not the
speculations, mystical or scientific, which make In Memoriam, in more
than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest
distress, when its technical beauties and wonderful pictures seem
shadowy and unreal, like the yellow sunshine and the woods of that
autumn day when a man learned that his friend was dead.
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