have the sorrowful
first seen the gates of heaven." "The echo of the nest-life, the voice
of our modest, fairer, holier soul" says Richter, "is audible only in a
sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their
eye." "Every noble crown is, and on earth will ever be, a crown of
thorns," says Carlyle "Sorrow", says Haunay, with rare knowledge, "turns
all the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge."
Sometimes all nature seems to condole with animate woes:

One weeping heart may tone a rural scene
To sadness. Reverently the trees will bend;
The little stream will sigh, with heaving pulse,
And swans, in soft and solemn silence float--
Grief's snowy celebrants.

It is a manifest peculiarity of the human mind to believe that its
sorrows should be more enduring than they really are. We have in this
phenomenon some of the clearest views of our weakness and inconsistency,
for though we deplore the destiny which deals out so much misery to us,
yet we despise ourselves, and are also thought somewhat less of by our
associates, if we do not embalm our griefs and remain a sort of
mummy-house above ground until the memory of our friends has grown
faulty and unreliable when applied to our affairs. Thus,

A WIFE LOSES HER HUSBAND.

The grief which she feels nearly crushes her spirit and evokes the
sympathies of her neighbors, as well it may. She finds a bitterness
within her heart which it is difficult to sweeten into resignation. Why
should the blow have singled her as its object? Then, with the lapse of
the days, comes a change of the season, and the wonderful climatic
effects on both mind and body accompanying them. She wanders into the
woods, and the rustling of the leaves beneath her feet betrays her from
her dead husband for the first time, and her

CONSCIENCE, THE SOLEMN OFFICER

of her moral nature, suddenly arrests a little girl wandering in the
woods in search of a butternut tree which lives like a hermit in the
deep of the forest. It is a stray memory of herself in the long ago! It
has wandered into her house of grief, and when it falls under the hand
of the law she feels great guilt for having harbored it. "O, my poor,
dear husband, have I so forgotten you?" she cries in mental sackcloth
and ashes. And then the frailty of human reason and action appear before
her and appall her. The time flies by. Soon still another season is
here, with

A TROO