ald, "the intercourse with nature operates
beneficently, and with a youth-restoring power upon the human heart. I
always remember with delight the words of Goethe, when in his eightieth
year, he returned one spring from a visit in the country, sunburnt and
full of gladness: 'I have had a conversation with the vine,' said he,
'and you cannot believe what beautiful things it has said to me.' Do we
not seem here to behold a new golden age beam forth, in which the voices
of nature become audible to the ear of man, and he in conversation with
her to acquire higher wisdom and tranquillity of life?"

"Our wisdom," said Mrs. Astrid, as she looked smilingly around, "has not
in the mean time prevented Susanna from being more sensible than us,
for she has thought of the wedding-guests, while we have quite forgotten
them. But we will now follow her!"

* * * * *

After the wedding-dinner spiced with skals and songs, and especially
with hearty merriment, Mrs. Astrid retired to her own room, and Alette
assumed the hostess's office in the company.

Sitting at her writing-table, Mrs. Astrid, with an animated air, and
quick respiration, sketched the following lines:

"Now come, come, my paternal friend, and behold your wishes, your
prognostications fulfilled; come and behold happiness and inexpressible
gratitude living in the bosom which so long was closed even to hope.
Come, and receive my contrition for my pusillanimity, for my murmurings;
come and help me to be thankful! I long to tell you orally how much is
changed within me; how a thousand germs of life and gladness, which I
believed to be dead, now spring up in my soul restored to youth. I
wonder daily over the feelings, the impressions which I experience; I
scarcely know myself again. Oh, my friend! how right you were--it is
never TOO LATE!

"Ah! that I could be heard by all oppressed, dejected souls! I would cry
to them--'Lift up your head, and confide still in the future, and
believe that it is never TOO LATE!' See! I too was bowed down by long
suffering, and old age had moreover overtaken me, and I believed that
all my strength had vanished; that my life, my sufferings were in
vain--and behold; my head has been again lifted up, my heart appeased,
my soul strengthened; and now, in my fiftieth year, I advance into a new
future, attended by all that life has of beautiful and worthy of love!

"The change in my soul has enabled me better to comp