so did my acquaintance (if such it could be called)
commence with mortality. Yet, in fact, I knew little more of mortality
than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; but, perhaps, she would
come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious immunity of
infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength! I was sad for Jane's
absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer
and winter came again--crocuses and roses; why not little Jane?

Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in my infant heart. Not so
the second. For thou, dear, noble Elizabeth, around whose ample brow, as
often as thy sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I fancy a tiara of
light or a gleaming _aureola_ in token of thy premature intellectual
grandeur--thou whose head, for its superb developments, was the
astonishment of science[4]--thou next, but after an interval of happy
years, thou also wert summoned away from our nursery; and the night which,
for me, gathered upon that event, ran after my steps far into life; and
perhaps at this day I resemble little for good or for ill that which else
I should have been. Pillar of fire, that didst go before me to guide and
to quicken--pillar of darkness, when thy countenance was turned away to
God, that didst too truly shed the shadow of death over my young heart--in
what scales should I weigh thee? Was the blessing greater from thy
heavenly presence, or the blight which followed thy departure? Can a man
weigh off and value the glories of dawn against the darkness of hurricane?
Or, if he could, how is it that, when a memorable love has been followed
by a memorable bereavement, even suppose that God would replace the
sufferer in a point of time anterior to the entire experience, and offer
to cancel the woe, but so that the sweet face which had caused the woe
should also be obliterated--vehemently would every man shrink from the
exchange! In the _Paradise Lost_, this strong instinct of man--to prefer
the heavenly, mixed and polluted with the earthly, to a level experience
offering neither one nor the other--is divinely commemorated. What worlds
of pathos are in that speech of Adam's--"If God should make another Eve,"
&c.--that is, if God should replace him in his primitive state, and should
condescend to bring again a second Eve, one that would listen to no
temptation--still that original partner of his earliest solitude--

"Creature in whom excell'd