The cairn

Chapter 150: Ill-placed Confidence.

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About This Book

A compact miscellany of short essays, anecdotes, prayers, poems, and biographical sketches that collects reflections on grief, maternal love, benevolence, virtue, taste, and historical episodes. The pieces alternate personal memories, moral aphorisms, humorous and touching anecdotes, and brief portraits of public figures, often framed as letters, epitaphs, or short narratives. Recurring themes include the effects of sorrow and joy, domestic affection, charity, the vicissitudes of fortune, and the consolations of faith and art. The tone moves between intimate recollection and light moralizing, presenting varied, self-contained vignettes meant to instruct, console, and amuse.

Ill-placed Confidence.

Among the bitter varieties of sorrow, forming the inheritance of the human kind, there are few more humiliating, more fitted to cleave into the inmost soul, than a discovery of the unworthiness of those we love; of a breach of confidence in that heart wherein we have deposited the whole treasure of our affections. There is a degree of self-abasement connected with the disappointment, which recoils with double force on our perceptions; the sharpness of the pain admits of no mitigation.