and help her, and rejects Him from his scheme of life.

In due time he falls in love with Kathrina, a young lady whom he first
sees on the occasion of her public reception into the Congregational
Church at Hadley. Later he learns that she is staying with the lady
whose pet lamb led him such a chase,--that she is in fact her niece, and
that she has seen better days. We must say that this good lady does
everything in her power to make a match between the young people; and
she is more pleased than surprised at the success of her efforts. It has
been the hero's idea that human love will fill up the void left in his
life by the rejection of God and religion; but he soon finds himself
vaguely unhappy and unsatisfied, and he determines to glut his heart
with literary fame. He goes, therefore, to New York, and succeeds as a
poet beyond all his dreams of success. For ten years he is the most
popular of authors; but he sickens of his facile triumph, and imagines
that to be happy he must write to please himself, and not the multitude.
He writes with this idea, but pleases nobody, and is as unhappy as ever.

Meanwhile, Kathrina has fallen into a decline. On her death-bed she
tells him that it is religion alone which can appease and satisfy him;
but she pleads with him in vain, till one day, when he enters her room,
and is startled by a strange coincidence: the lamb, which led him to the
mountain-top and the consciousness of poetic power, had a scarlet ribbon
on its neck, and now he finds this ribbon

"at her throat
Repeated in a bright geranium-flower!"

Then Kathrina tells him that his mother's spirit has talked with her,
and bidden her say to him this:--

"The lamb has slipped the leash by which his hand
Held her in thrall, and seeks the mountain-height;
And he, if he reclaim her to his grasp,
Must follow where she leads, and kneel at last
Upon the summit by her side. And more,
Give him my promise that, if he do this,
He shall receive from that fair altitude
Such a vision of the realm that lies around,
Cleft by the river of immortal life,
As shall so lift him from his selfishness,
And so enlarge his soul, that he shall stand
Redeemed from all unworthiness, and saved
To happiness and heaven."

Whereupon, having delivered her message, Kathrina bids him kneel. It is
the supreme moment of her life. He hears his mother's voice, and the
voice of the innumer