nchanted the
old marbles,--charm untold and inconceivable to one who had never seen
even the slightest approach to a work of art? Then those glaciers of
Switzerland, that grand, unapproachable mixture of beauty and sublimity
in her mountains!--what would it be to one who could see it? Then what
were all those harmonies of which she read,--masses, fugues, symphonies?
Oh, could she once hear the Miserere of Mozart, just to know what music
was like! And the cathedrals, what were they? How wonderful they must
be, with their forests of arches, many-colored as autumn-woods with
painted glass, and the chants and anthems rolling down their long
aisles! On all these things she pondered quietly, as she sat often on
Sundays in the old staring, rattle-windowed meeting-house, and looked at
the uncouth old pulpit, and heard the choir faw-sol-la-ing or singing
fuguing tunes; but of all this she said nothing.

Sometimes, for days, her thoughts would turn from these subjects and be
absorbed in mathematical or metaphysical studies. "I have been following
that treatise on Optics for a week, and never understood it till
to-day," she once said to her husband. "I have found now that there has
been a mistake in drawing the diagrams. I have corrected it, and now the
demonstration is complete.--Dinah, take care, that wood is hickory, and
it takes only seven sticks of that size to heat the oven."

It is not to be supposed that a woman of this sort was an inattentive
listener to preaching so stimulating to the intellect as that of Dr. H.
No pair of eyes followed the web of his reasonings with a keener and
more anxious watchfulness than those sad, deep-set, hazel ones; and as
she was drawn along the train of its inevitable logic, a close observer
might have seen how the shadows deepened over them. For, while others
listened for the clearness of the thought, for the acuteness of the
argument, she listened as a soul wide, fine-strung, acute, repressed,
whose every fibre is a nerve, listens to the problem of its own
destiny,--listened as the mother of a family listens, to know what were
the possibilities, the probabilities, of this mysterious existence of
ours to herself and those dearer to her than herself.

The consequence of all her listening was a history of deep inward
sadness. That exultant joy, or that entire submission, with which others
seemed to view the scheme of the universe, as thus unfolded, did not
visit her mind. Everything to her s