o suffer, and alone to strive?"

So was rendered the sad soul-music of one of the legion,

"Who learned in sorrow
What they taught in song."

and the weird words have been echoed by the voice of many a woman all
along, whose weary wanderings have burned the sacrificial fires; amid the
ashes of whose dead hopes the embers have flickered and faded only to
rekindle the lurid, lustrous light of added, and still added offerings.
There, waiting and watching the deep tracery "upon the sands beside the
sounding sea," find wave after wave wash away the mystic hand-writing.

The ebbing tide carries afar the ships freighted with aching, anguished
hearts; when borne upon the swell of the flowing sea, come the swift sails
of Argosies richly laden with hope, full with fruition.

Within the heart of all there lies deeply imbedded the "Black Drop" of
which the Mahometan legend tells, and which the angel revealed to the
Prophet of Allah. 'Tis in aching anguish this drop must be probed and
purified, to be healed only through the endless eloquence of duty done.

The sightless eyes have vivid visions. Theirs is the light in darkness
which stirred the soul of a Milton with a "gift divine;" inspired a Homer
with the "fire and frenzy" which crowned an Iliad and an Odyssey, the
master pieces of Epic verse; gave to the antique and traditional
literature of the Celtic race its meteoric brilliancy, and produced the
weird, wondrous sublimity of an Ossian.

All who have read the Invocation to Light by the blind authoress, Mrs. De
Kroyft, must have realized the luminous light of a soul sublimated by
sorrow and swelling and soaring in eloquent strains.

'Tis but a simple song I must sing, a bird-note amid cathedral tones; but
may not its minstrelsy meet the heart and search the soul of many a
sorrowing one, or rise like the song of the nightingale to the throne of
Him who sees the lives enthralled?

If this little lesson of life can find a single searcher for the truth it
tells, or bear on the breath of the breeze "one soft AEolian strain," may I
not hope that it may help to swell the harp-notes of the heavenly
harmonies?

CHAPTER II.

"I remember, I remember
How my childhood fleeted by--
The mirth of its December,
And the warmth of its July."

In a former volume I have recounted the varied scenes of an eventful
childhood, whose auroral dawn was tinted with the rose-hue and perfumed
with the breath