arkness. Thy name has long slept in our heart--and there let it sleep
unbreathed--even as, when we are dreaming our way through some solitary
place, without naming it we bless the beauty of some sweet wildflower,
pensively smiling to us through the snow.

The Sabbath returns on which, in the little kirk among the hills, we saw
thee baptised. Then comes a wavering glimmer of five sweet years, that
to Thee, in all their varieties, were but as one delightful season, one
blessed life--and, finally, that other Sabbath, on which, at thy own
dying request--between services thou wert buried.

How mysterious are all thy ways and workings, O gracious Nature! Thou
who art but a name given by us to the Being in whom all things are and
have life. Ere three years old, she, whose image is now with us, all
over the small sylvan world that beheld the evanescent revelation of her
pure existence, was called the "Holy Child!" The taint of Sin--inherited
from those who disobeyed in Paradise--seemed from her fair clay to have
been washed out at the baptismal font, and by her first infantine tears.
So pious people almost believed, looking on her so unlike all other
children, in the serenity of that habitual smile that clothed the
creature's countenance with a wondrous beauty, at an age when on other
infants is but faintly seen the dawn of reason, and their eyes look
happy just like the thoughtless flowers. So unlike all other
children--but unlike only because sooner than they she seemed to have
had given to her, even in the communion of the cradle, an intimation of
the being and the providence of God. Sooner, surely, than through any
other clay that ever enshrouded immortal spirit, dawned the light of
religion on the face of the "Holy Child."

Her lisping language was sprinkled with words alien from common
childhood's uncertain speech, that murmurs only when indigent nature
prompts; and her own parents wondered whence they came, when first they
looked upon her kneeling in an unbidden prayer. As one mild week of
vernal sunshine covers the braes with primroses, so shone with fair and
fragrant feelings--unfolded, ere they knew, before her parents'
eyes--the divine nature of her who for a season was lent to them from
the skies. She learned to read out of the Bible--almost without any
teaching--they knew not how--just by looking gladly on the words, even
as she looked on the pretty daisies on the green--till their meanings
stole insensibly into