of the mind to which diamonds correspond, nor without seeing
some new evidence that she wears no priceless jewels in her soul.

IV.

NOT AS A CHILD.

"_I DO_ not know how that may be," said the mother, lifting her head,
and looking through almost blinding tears, into the face of her friend.
"The poet may be right, and, "Not as a child shall I again behold him,
but the thought brings no comfort. I have lost my child, and my heart
looks eagerly forward to a reunion with him in heaven; to the blessed
hour when I shall again hold him in my arms."

"As a babe?"

"Oh, yes. As a darling babe, pure, and beautiful as a cherub."

"But would you have him linger in babyhood forever?" asked the friend.

The mother did not reply.

"Did you expect him always to remain a child here? Would perpetual
infancy have satisfied your maternal heart? Had you not already begun
to look forward to the period when intellectual manhood would come with
its crowning honors?"

"It is true," sighed the mother.

"As it would have been here, so will it be there. Here, the growth of
his body would have been parallel, if I may so speak, with the growth
of his mind. The natural and the visible would have developed in
harmony with the spiritual and the invisible. Your child would have
grown to manhood intellectually, as well as bodily. And you would not
have had it otherwise. Growth--development--the going on to perfection,
are the laws of life; and more emphatically so as appertaining to the
life of the human soul. That life, in all its high activities, burns
still in the soul of your lost darling, and he will grow, in the world
of angelic spirits to which our Father has removed him, up to the full
stature of an angel, a glorified form of intelligence and wisdom. He
cannot linger in feeble babyhood; in the innocence of simple ignorance;
but must advance with the heavenly cycles of changing and renewing
states."

"And this is all the comfort you bring to my yearning heart?" said the
mother. "My darling, if all you say be true, is lost to me forever."

"He was not yours, but God's." The friend spoke softly, yet with a firm
utterance.

"He was mine to love," replied the bereaved one.

"And your love would confer upon its precious object the richest
blessings. Dear friend! Lift your thoughts a little way above the
clouds that sorrow has gathered around your heart, and let perception
come into an atmosphere radiant with light from the Su