, will be ever present with me! Yet, with my face half hidden by
the evergreens, I stand and wait her coming. They enter, bride and
bridegroom; she leaning trustfully upon his arm. O Jennie! _my_ Jennie;
thou who shouldst have been my bride! Great waves of tearless anguish
rolled over my soul at the sight! Jennie, the priest who ministers at
the altar before which thou standest, is idly repeating words whose holy
meaning he does not comprehend: is _separating_, not _uniting_ those
whom God has joined together. O Jennie! companion of my spirit! is there
no far-off, distant echo awakened in thy soul by the bitter waves of
anguish surging over mine? Not now, in this thine hour of earthly love
and triumph; not now. Even in spirit, 'lover and friend,' hast thou been
put far from me. The low, measured tones of the minister fall on my ear;
and I count the brief moments that give her to the keeping of another
for all her _mortal_ life, as the watcher counts the last moments of the
dying and the loved. They kneel in prayer before the mockery of those
last words is spoken, and I kneel too, crying to the Almighty: 'Wrest
even now my treasure from him, or still the anguished throbbings of my
heart forever! Let me die!' O Thou tempted in all points even as we, yet
without sin, it was meet in this my hour of extremest suffering, that
Thou shouldst send the promised comforter, not to bestow the earthly
good I prayed for, but to raise me above earth and all of earthly good.
Opening my inner vision to behold, far as the eye of the finite may
behold, what is comprehended in the omniscient glance of the
Infinite--removing the clouds brooding so darkly over my spirit, and
filling it with holy joy, by imparting radiant glimpses of the soul's
calmer and higher life in the land beyond--'the life that rights the
wrongs, and reveals the mysteries of this,'--the words that were once my
hope and the inspiration of my toil, came now, when that hope was dead,
to soothe and comfort me--the spirit of prophecy, that cheered my spirit
with the hopeful promise of good in the time to come, and stirring my
soul to its depths, sounding through it like a song of solemn triumph.

What though thou beholdest her the bride of another, her own heart
blinded so that she cannot see aright! She is _thine_ through all the
countless years of thy immortality! His but for a brief and fleeting
season! He holds his treasure in a trembling, uncertain grasp. Change
may sepa