ed child led to
sleep, stayed with her some time, and then returned to me, pressing me
to his breast father-like.

"No hope! no hope!" said I, recoiling from his embrace. "You are silent.
Speak! speak! Let me know the worst."

"I have a hope, yet I scarcely dare to bid you share it; for it grows
rather out of my heart as man than my experience as physician. I cannot
think that her soul would be now so reconciled to earth, so fondly, so
earnestly, cling to this mortal life, if it were about to be summoned
away. You know how commonly even the sufferers who have dreaded death
the most become calmly resigned to its coming, when death visibly
reveals itself out from the shadows in which its shape has been guessed
and not seen. As it is a bad sign for life when the patient has lost all
will to live on, so there is hope while the patient, yet young and with
no perceptible breach in the great centres of life (however violently
their forts may be stormed), has still intense faith in recovery,
perhaps drawn (who can say?) from the whispers conveyed from above to
the soul.

"I cannot bring myself to think that all the uses for which a reason,
always so lovely even in its errors, has been restored, are yet
fulfilled. It seems to me as if your union, as yet so imperfect, has
still for its end that holy life on earth by which two mortal beings
strengthen each other for a sphere of existence to which this is the
spiritual ladder. Through yourself I have hope yet for her. Gifted with
powers that rank you high in the manifold orders of man,--thoughtful,
laborious, and brave; with a heart that makes intellect vibrate to every
fine touch of humanity; in error itself, conscientious; in delusion,
still eager for truth; in anger, forgiving; in wrong, seeking how to
repair; and, best of all, strong in a love which the mean would have
shrunk to defend from the fangs of the slanderer,--a love, raising
passion itself out of the realm of the senses, made sublime by the
sorrows that tried its devotion,--with all these noble proofs in
yourself of a being not meant to end here, your life has stopped short
in its uses, your mind itself has been drifted, a bark without rudder
or pilot, over seas without shore, under skies without stars. And
wherefore? Because the mind you so haughtily vaunted has refused its
companion and teacher in Soul.

"And therefore, through you, I hope that she will be spared yet to live
on; she, in whom soul has been led d