some healing influence into the desolate heart.

I know not; but as I stood upon the hill-top to-day at evening, the
setting sun gilding the cloud-edges, and touching the horizon with a
delicate misty azure, my spirit did indeed awake with a smile, with a
murmured word of hope.

If I, who have lost everything that can enrich and gladden life, can
yet feel that inalienable residue of hope, which just turns the balance
on the side of desiring still to live, it must be that life has
something yet in store for me--I do not hope for love, I do not desire
the old gift of expression again; but there is something to learn, to
apprehend, to understand. I have learnt, I think, not to grasp at
anything, not to clasp anything close to my heart; the dream of
possession has fled from me; it will be enough if, as I learn the
lesson, I can ease a few burdens and help frail feet along the road.
Duty, pleasure, work--strange names which we give to life, perversely
separating the strands of the woven thread, they hold no meaning for me
now--I do not expect to be free from suffering or from grief; but I
will no more distinguish them from other experiences saying, this is
joyful, and I will take all I can, or this is sad, and I will fly from
it. I will take life whole, not divide it into pieces and choose. My
grief shall be like a silent chapel, lit with holy light, into which I
shall often enter, and bend, not to frame mechanical prayers, but to
submit myself to the still influence of the shrine. It is all my own
now, a place into which no other curious eye can penetrate, a guarded
sanctuary. My sorrow seems to have plucked me with a strong hand out of
the swirling drift of cares, anxieties, ambitions, hopes; and I see now
that I could not have rescued myself; that I should have gone on
battling with the current, catching at the river wrack, in the hopes of
saving something from the stream. Now I am face to face with God; He
saves me from myself, He strips my ragged vesture from me and I stand
naked as He made me, unashamed, nestling close to His heart.

April 3, 1891.

A truth which has come home to me of late with a growing intensity is
that we are sent into the world for the sake of experience, not
necessarily for the sake of immediate happiness. I feel that the
mistake we most of us make is in reaching out after a sense of
satisfaction; and even if we learn to do without that, we find it very
difficult to do without the sense o