suffer so?" But I think of my father's answer when I told him this: "And
why shouldn't they suffer? SHE suffered; it will do them good; for pity,
genuine pity, is, as old Aristotle says, 'of power to purge the mind.'"
And though in all works of art there should be a plus of delectation,
the ultimate overcoming of evil and sorrow by good and joy,--the end of
all art being pleasure,--whatsoever things are lovely first, and things
that are true and of good report afterwards in their turn,--still there
is a pleasure, one of the strangest and strongest in our nature, in
imaginative suffering with and for others,--

"In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;"

for sympathy is worth nothing, is, indeed, not itself, unless it has in
it somewhat of personal pain. It is the hereafter that gives to

"the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still,"

its own infinite meaning. Our hearts and our understandings follow Ailie
and her "ain man" into that world where there is no pain, where no one
says, "I am sick." What is all the philosophy of Cicero, the wailing of
Catullus, and the gloomy playfulness of Horace's variations on "Let us
eat and drink," with its terrific "for," to the simple faith of the
carrier and his wife in "I am the resurrection and the Life"?

I think I can hear from across the fields of sleep and other years
Ailie's sweet, dim, wandering voice trying to say,--

Our bonnie bairn's there, John,