d away the darkness and the memory of the darkness from the little
creature's brain, a sensible expansion had taken place in the
intellectual faculties of attention, observation, and animation. It
renewed the case of our great modern poet, who, on listening to the
raving of the midnight storm, and the crashing which it was making in
the mighty woods, reminded himself that all this hell of trouble

'Tells also of bright calms that shall succeed.'

Pain driven to agony, or grief driven to frenzy, is essential to the
ventilation of profound natures. A sea which is deeper than any that
Count Massigli[3] measured cannot be searched and torn up from its
sleeping depths without a levanter or a monsoon. A nature which is
profound in excess, but also introverted and abstracted in excess, so as
to be in peril of wasting itself in interminable reverie, cannot be
awakened sometimes without afflictions that go to the very foundations,
heaving, stirring, yet finally harmonizing; and it is in such cases that
the Dark Interpreter does his work, revealing the worlds of pain and
agony and woe possible to man--possible even to the innocent spirit of a
child.

2.--THE SOLITUDE OF CHILDHOOD.

As nothing which is impassioned escapes the eye of poetry, neither has
this escaped it--that there is, or may be, through solitude, 'sublime
attractions of the grave.' But even poetry has not perceived that these
attractions may arise for a child. Not, indeed, a passion for the grave
_as_ the grave--from _that_ a child revolts; but a passion for the grave
as the portal through which it may recover some heavenly countenance,
mother or sister, that has vanished. Through solitude this passion may
be exalted into a frenzy like a nympholepsy. At first, when in childhood
we find ourselves torn away from the lips that we could hang on for
ever, we throw out our arms in vain struggles to snatch at them, and
pull them back again. But when we have felt for a time how hopeless is
that effort, and that they cannot come to _us_, we desist from that
struggle, and next we whisper to our hearts, Might not we go to _them_?

Such in principle and origin was the famous _Dulce Domum_[4] of the
English schoolboy. Such is the _Heimweh_ (home-sickness) of the German
and Swiss soldier in foreign service. Such is the passion of the
Calenture. Doubtless, reader, you have seen it described. The poor
sailor is in tropical latitudes; deep, breathless calms have pre