r spoke
with any degree of ardor were religious subjects.

One who should have seen moving about the daily ministrations of the
cottage a pale girl, whose steps were firm, whose eye was calm, whose
hands were ever busy, would scarce imagine that through that silent
heart were passing tides of thought that measured a universe; but it was
even so. Through that one gap of sorrow flowed in the whole awful
mystery of existence, and silently, as she spun and sewed, she thought
over and over again all that she had ever been taught, and compared and
revolved it by the light of a dawning inward revelation.

Sorrow is the great birth-agony of immortal powers,--sorrow is the great
searcher and revealer of hearts, the great test of truth; for Plato has
wisely said, sorrow will not endure sophisms,--all shams and unrealities
melt in the fire of that awful furnace. Sorrow reveals forces in
ourselves we never dreamed of. The soul, a bound and sleeping prisoner,
hears her knock on her cell-door, and wakens. Oh, how narrow the walls!
oh, how close and dark the grated window! how the long useless wings
beat against the impassable barriers! Where are we? What is this prison?
What is beyond? Oh for more air, more light! When will the door be
opened? The soul seems to itself to widen and deepen; it trembles at its
own dreadful forces; it gathers up in waves that break with wailing only
to flow back into the everlasting void. The calmest and most centred
natures are sometimes thrown by the shock of a great sorrow into a
tumultuous amazement. All things are changed. The earth no longer seems
solid, the skies no longer secure; a deep abyss seems underlying every
joyous scene of life. The soul, struck with this awful inspiration, is a
mournful Cassandra; she sees blood on every threshold, and shudders in
the midst of mirth and festival with the weight of a terrible wisdom.

Who shall dare be glad any more, that has once seen the frail
foundations on which love and joy are built? Our brighter hours, have
they only been weaving a network of agonizing remembrances for this day
of bereavement? The heart is pierced with every past joy, with every
hope of its ignorant prosperity. Behind every scale in music, the gayest
and cheeriest, the grandest, the most triumphant, lies its dark relative
minor; the notes are the same, but the change of a semitone changes all
to gloom;--all our gayest hours are tunes that have a modulation into
these dreary keys