The Altar Fire
PREFACE It will perhaps be said, and truly felt, that the following is a morbid book. No doubt the subject is a morbid one, because the book deliberately gives a picture of a diseased spirit. But a pathological treatise, dealing with cancer or paralysis, is not necessarily morbid, though it may be studied in a morbid mood. We have learnt of late years, to our gain and profit, to think and speak of bodily ailments as natural phenomena, not to slur over them and hide them away in attics and bedrooms. We no longer think of insanity as demoniacal possession, and we no longer immure people with diseased brains in the secluded apartments of lovely houses. But we still tend to think of the sufferings of the heart and soul as if they were unreal, imaginary, hypochondriacal things, which could be cured by a little resolution and by intercourse with cheerful society; and by this foolish and secretive reticence we lose both sympathy and help. Mrs. Proctor, the friend of Carlyle and Lamb, a brilliant and somewhat stoical lady, is recorded to have said to a youthful relative of a sickly habit, with stern emphasis, "Never tell people how you are! They don't want to know."
like a common cur, is Man.
Among my neighbors who furnish me much of the plain prose of life,
the nearest hitherto has been a bachelor named Jacob Mariner. I
called him my rain-cow, because the sound of his voice awoke
apprehensions of falling weather. A visit from him was an endless
drizzle. For Jacob came over to expound his minute symptoms; and
had everything that he gave out on the subject of human ailments
been written down, it must have made a volume as large, as solemn,
and as inconvenient as a family Bible. My other nearest neighbor
lives across the road--a widow, Mrs. Walters. I call Mrs. Walters
my mocking-bird, because she reproduces by what is truly a divine
arrangement of the throat the voices of the town. When she flutters
across to the yellow settee under the grape-vine and balances herself
lightly with expectation, I have but to request that she favor me
with a little singing, and soon the air is vocal with every note
of the village songsters. After this, Mrs. Walters usually begins
to flutter in a motherly way around the subject of _my_ symptoms.
Naturally it has been my wish to bring about between this rain-cow
and mocking-bird the desire to pair with one another. For, if a
man always wanted to tell his symptoms and a woman always wished
to hear about them, surely a marriage compact on the basis of such
a passion ought to open up for them a union of overflowing and
indestructible felicity. They should associate as perfectly as the
compensating metals of a pendulum, of which the one contracts as
PREFACE It will perhaps be said, and truly felt, that the following is a morbid book. No doubt the subject is a morbid one, because the book deliberately gives a picture of a diseased spirit. But a pathological treatise, dealing with cancer or paralysis, is not necessarily morbid, though it may be studied in a morbid mood. We have learnt of late years, to our gain and profit, to think and speak of bodily ailments as natural phenomena, not to slur over them and hide them away in attics and bedrooms. We no longer think of insanity as demoniacal possession, and we no longer immure people with diseased brains in the secluded apartments of lovely houses. But we still tend to think of the sufferings of the heart and soul as if they were unreal, imaginary, hypochondriacal things, which could be cured by a little resolution and by intercourse with cheerful society; and by this foolish and secretive reticence we lose both sympathy and help. Mrs. Proctor, the friend of Carlyle and Lamb, a brilliant and somewhat stoical lady, is recorded to have said to a youthful relative of a sickly habit, with stern emphasis, "Never tell people how you are! They don't want to know."