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We are too accustomed to the ordinary and the obvious to consider that beauty or worth may, after bitter travail, grow out of that which is ugly and unpromising. Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop from them or what their stories were to be.
And the most pitiful thing was this that mine eyes have seen of all my travail in searching out the paths of the sea. 'Now when we had escaped the Rocks and dread Charybdis and Scylla, thereafter we soon came to the fair island of the god; where were the goodly kine, broad of brow, and the many brave flocks of Helios Hyperion.
No, Colonel, I shall never forget the misery of the house of Ellangowan that morning! the father half-distracted the mother dead in premature travail the helpless infant, with scarce any one to attend it, coming wawling and crying into this miserable world at such a moment of unutterable misery. We lawyers are not of iron, sir, or of brass, any more than you soldiers are of steel.
O mighty and enduring force of early associations, that almost seems, in its unconquerable strength, to partake of an innate prepossession, that binds the son to the mother who concealed him in her womb and purchased life for him with the travail of death? fountain of filial love, which coldness cannot freeze, nor injustice embitter, nor pride divert into fresh channels, nor time, and the hot suns of our toiling manhood, exhaust, even at this moment, how livingly do you gush upon my heart, and water with your divine waves the memories that yet flourish amidst the sterility of years?
Surely it would have been more in accordance with the fitness of things had one of those prophetic and strenuous souls been enabled to see the travail of his soul and be satisfied; he, for example, a thousand times rather than I, who, having beheld in a vision the world I looked on, sang of it in words that again and again, during these last wondrous days, had rung in my mind: For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled.
"A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world."
For this cause did God send ever among both Prophets and Apostles, and last of all His "own Son," who might bring home the people into the right way, and repair anew the tottering Church after she had erred. "O my little children, of whom I travail anew till Christ be fashioned again in you." And as for the Church of the Corinthians, how foully it was denied, is nothing needful to rehearse.
In California there had been religious persecution and in New Mexico the valleys very generally had been occupied for centuries by agricultural Indians and by native peoples speaking an alien tongue. There was extension over into northern Mexico, with consequent travail when impotent governments crumbled.
This was certainly a period of ageing activity in Burns's life. It seemed as if there had been a conspiracy of fate and circumstance to herald the birth of his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of a play that had all the makings of a farce and all the elements of a tragedy.
The influence of the holy character passes even beyond the stars, giving joy to our angel brothers, and to our elder brother Jesus Christ, who, in seeing reflected in His people His own love to His God and our God, to His neighbour and ours, beholds the grand result of the travail of His soul, and is "satisfied."
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