Those Unwritten Letters
By Anon.
AMONG sins of omission, a very unenviable prominence attaches to the letters that were never written. We ought to have written; the old friend had a claim to which reason and affection alike subscribed—and yet we failed. We did not mean to fail; we fully intended to write, and there was no reason why we should not have written—and yet—we failed. What a world of heartache and lonesomeness lies back of those unwritten letters—what a world of unselfish affection seemingly unrequited! and what a world of light and joy those letters would have ushered into human lives! It does not cost much to light a candle; but on a dreary night, that light may mean a vast increase of happiness. It does not cost much to write a letter; but to some lonely and discouraged heart, that letter may be a big candle on a very dark night. Why should a letter mean so much? Ask the father or mother when they are watching for the letter from the far-away child. Ask the youth in the big city who has come to make his fortune and who does not intend to fail, but who somehow finds the very bigness of it all the most lonesome thing in the world, and whose heart seems ever to recur to the old farm home so far away. The letter is the bridge over which the heart travels home. It is a mistake to value a letter at its face value. The value of the letter does not usually lie in the finely formed letters, the correctly spelled words, and the neatly turned phrases. Sometimes we have known a letter that had almost every possible fault from the technical standpoint, but to the reader it breathed the atmosphere of heaven itself, for it came from one whose fingers indeed might blunder and whose knowledge might trip, but whose heart had never known disloyalty and whose love had never known change. It seems a strange kind of irony that, perhaps, the bulk of our letters are those which make but little difference. If they had never been written, the world would be little the loser, and yet these letters do not fail to get written; but the letter which counts, the one which would enrich this poor world, is the one which somehow does not seem to get written. Why is this the case? One reason seems to lie in the very fact that it is an exceptional letter, it is not demanded by business, it is not an ordinary letter which says little and perhaps means less, but one which in the very nature of things means all and14more than it says, a letter which speaks from one heart to another. How many such letters do our readers owe to their friends at this very time? We are confident that in many cases there are letters which ought to have been written years ago—and they are not written yet. To some of us it is something of a trial to write a letter, but the trouble does not lie in the mere difficulty of writing, but rather in the difficulty of deciding to write. Should we not have some time set apart for this work, some altar to friendship, if you will, and regularly attend to its sacred duties? Most of us, perhaps, do not realize just how much that letter may mean to our absent friend, but we know it will mean a good deal. May it not be that we have grown careless, and that our hearts are not just as true as they should be to our friends? Montesquieu tells us that there are two classes of people who are apt to become hard-hearted, the extremely happy and the extremely unhappy. May it not be with many of us that life is so full of happiness that we have ceased to care just as much as we used to how it goes with our friends? Has our happiness hardened our hearts? If so, we need swift repentance. Somewhere in our little world some heart is waiting wearily for our message of love and cheer. No other pen but ours can write the words of helpfulness; shall we not heed it and quickly respond? Write those unwritten letters.—Anon.