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Harriet Martineau
by
The memory of a great love can never die from out the heart. It affords a ballast ‘gainst all the storms that blow. And although it lends an unutterable sadness, it imparts an unspeakable peace.
A great love, even when fully possessed, affords no complete gratification. There is an essence in it that eludes all ownership. Its highest use seems to be a purifying impulse for nobler endeavor. It says at the last, “Arise, and get thee hence, for this is not thy rest.”
Where there is this haunting memory of a great love lost there is always forgiveness, charity, and a sympathy that makes the man brother to all who endure and suffer. The individual himself is nothing; he has nothing to hope for, nothing to gain, nothing to win, nothing to lose; for the first time and the last he has a selflessness that is wide as the world, and wherein there is no room for the recollection of a wrong. In this memory of a great love, there is a nourishing source of strength by which the possessor lives and works; he is in communication with elemental conditions.
Harriet Martineau was a lifelong widow of the heart. That first great passion of her early womanhood, the love that was lost, remained with her all the days of her life: springing fresh every morning, her last thought as she closed her eyes at night. Other loves came to her, attachments varying in nature and degree, but in this supreme love all was fused and absorbed. In this love, you get the secret of power.
A great love is a pain, yet it is a benison and a benediction. If we carry any possession from this world to another it is the memory of a great love. For even in the last hour, when the coldness of death shall creep into the stiffening limbs, and the brain shall be stunned and the thoughts stifled, there shall come to the tongue a name, a name not mentioned aloud for years–there shall come a name; and as the last flickering rays of life flare up to go out on earth forever, the tongue will speak this name that was long, long ago burned into the soul by the passion of a love that fadeth not away.