so long is
ineffaceable; it is an earthly immortality.

"Time is the chariot of all ages to carry men away, and beauty cannot
bribe this charioteer." Thus wrote Petrarch in his Latin essays; but
his love had wealth that proved resistless and for Laura the chariot
stayed.

A SHADOW.

I shall always remember one winter evening, a little before
Christmas-time, when I took a long, solitary walk in the outskirts of
the town. The cold sunset had left a trail of orange light along the
horizon, the dry snow tinkled beneath my feet, and the early stars had
a keen, clear lustre that matched well with the sharp sound and the
frosty sensation. For some time I had walked toward the gleam of a
distant window, and as I approached, the light showed more and more
clearly through the white curtains of a little cottage by the road. I
stopped, on reaching it, to enjoy the suggestion of domestic
cheerfulness in contrast with the dark outside. I could not see the
inmates, nor they me; but something of human sympathy came from that
steadfast ray.

As I looked, a film of shade kept appearing and disappearing with
rhythmic regularity in a corner of the window, as if some one might be
sitting in a low rocking-chair close by. Presently the motion ceased,
and suddenly across the curtain came the shadow of a woman. She raised
in her arms the shadow of a baby, and kissed it; then both disappeared,
and I walked on.

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, so
traced as to endure forever? In this picture of mine, the group
actually moved upon the canvas. The curtains that hid it revealed it.
The ecstasy of human love passed in brief, intangible panorama before
me. It was something seen, yet unseen; airy, yet solid; a type, yet a
reality; fugitive, yet destined to last in my memory while I live. It
said more to me than would any Madonna of Raphael's, for his mother
never kisses her child. I believe I have never passed over that road
since then, never seen the house, never heard the names of its
occupants. Their character, their history, their fate, are all unknown.
But these two will always stand for me as disembodied types of
humanity,--the Mother and the Child; they seem nearer to me than my
immediate neighbors, yet they are as ideal and impersonal as the
goddesses of Greece or as Plato's archetypal man.

I know not the parentage of that child, whether black or white, native
or foreign, rich or poor. It makes no di