rds; it is one thing to take no thought, for want of thought, and
another to take no thought, from sufficing thought, whose flower is
confidence. The one way is the lovely way of God in the birds--the
other, His lovelier way in his men and women. She had in her the making
of a noble woman--only that is true of every woman; and it was no truer
of her than of every other woman, that, without religion, she could
never be, in any worthy sense, a woman at all. I know how narrow and
absurd this will sound to many of my readers, but such simply do not
know what religion means, and think I do not know what a woman means.
Hitherto her past had always turned to a dream as it glided away from
her; but now, in the pauses of her prime agony, the tide rose from the
infinite sea to which her river ran, and all her past was borne back
upon her, even to her far-gone childish quarrels with her silly mother,
and the neglect and disobedience she had too often been guilty of toward
her father. And the center of her memories was the hot coal of that one
secret; around that they all burned and hissed. Now for the first time
her past _was_, and she cowered and fled from it, a slave to her own
history, to her own deeds, to her own concealment. Alas, like many
another terror-stricken child, to whom the infinite bosom of tenderness
and love stretches out arms of shelter and healing and life, she turned
to the bosom of death, and imagined there a shelter of oblivious
darkness! For life is a thing so deep, so high, so pure, so far above
the reach of common thought, that, although shadowed out in all the
harmonic glories of color, and speech, and song, and scent, and motion,
and shine, yea, even of eyes and loving hands, to common minds--and the
more merely intellectual, the commoner are they--it seems but a
phantasm. To unchildlike minds, the region of love and worship, to
which lead the climbing stairs of duty, is but a nephelocockygia; they
acknowledge the stairs, however, thank God, and if they will but climb,
a hand will be held out to them. Now, to pray to a God, the very thought
of whose possible existence might seem enough to turn the coal of a dead
life into a diamond of eternal radiance, is with many such enough to
stamp a man a fool. It will surprise me nothing in the new world to hear
such men, finding they are not dead after all, begin at once to argue
that they were quite right in refusing to act upon any bare
possibility--forgetting tha