nit your heart
so strongly to those children, and to her--the mother,--anxieties which
distressed you,--which you would eagerly have shunned, yet whose memory
you would not now bargain away for a king's ransom! What were the
sunlight worth, if clouds did not sometimes hide its brightness; what
were the spring, or the summer, if the lessons of the chilling winter
did not teach us the story of their warmth?

The days are gone too, in which you may have lingered under the sweet
suns of Italy,--with the cherished one beside you, and the eager
children, learning new prattle in the soft language of those Eastern
lands. The evenings are gone, in which you loitered under the trees with
those dear ones under the light of a harvest-moon, and talked of your
blooming hopes, and of the stirring plans of your manhood. There are no
more ambitious hopes, no more sturdy plans! Life's work has rounded into
the evening that shortens labor.

And as you loiter in dreams over the wide waste of what is gone,--a
mingled array of griefs and of joys, of failures and of triumphs,--you
bless God that there has been so much of joy belonging to your shattered
life; and you pray God, with the vain fondness that belongs to a
parent's heart, that more of joy, and less of toil, may come near to the
cherished ones who bear up your hope and name.

And with your silent prayer come back the old teachings, and vagaries of
the boyish heart in its reaches toward Heaven. You recall the old
church-reckoning of your goodness: is there much more of it now than
then? Is not Heaven just as high, and the world as sadly broad?

Alas, for the poor tale of goodness which age brings to the memory!
There may be crowning acts of benevolence, shining here and there; but
the margin of what has not been done is very broad. How weak and
insignificant seems the story of life's goodness and profit, when Death
begins to slant his shadow upon our souls! How infinite in the
comparison seems that Eternal goodness which is crowned with mercy. How
self vanishes, like a blasted thing, and only lives--if it lives at
all--in the glow of that redeeming light which radiates from the
CROSS and the THRONE!

II.

_What is Left._

But much as there is gone of life, and of its joys, very much
remains,--very much in earnest, and very much more in hope. Still you
see visions, and you dream dreams, of the times that are to come.

Your home and heart are left; within that home, th