bled_ pleasure; the peace, the rest, the lulls, the central
security, which belong to love, that is past all understanding, _those_
could return no more. Such a love, so unfathomable, subsisting between
myself and my eldest sister, under the circumstances of our difference
in age (she being above eight years of age, I under six), and of our
affinities in nature, together with the sudden foundering of all this
blind happiness, I have described elsewhere.[10] I shall not here repeat
any part of the narrative. But one extract from the closing sections of
the paper I shall make; in order to describe the depth to which a
child's heart may be plowed up by one over-mastering storm of grief, and
as a proof that grief, in some of its fluctuations, is not uniformly a
depressing passion--but also by possibility has its own separate
aspirations, and at times is full of cloudy grandeur. The point of time
is during the months that immediately succeeded to my sister's funeral.

"The awful stillness of summer noons, when no winds were abroad--the
appealing silence of gray or misty afternoons--these were to me, in that
state of mind, fascinations, as of witchcraft. Into the woods, or the
desert air, I gazed as if some comfort lay in _them_. I wearied the
heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks. I tormented the blue depths
with obstinate scrutiny, sweeping them with my eyes, and searching them
forever, after one angelic face, that might perhaps have permission to
reveal itself for a moment. The faculty of shaping images in the
distance, out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings
of the heart, grew upon me at this time. And I recall at the present
moment one instance of that sort, which may show how merely shadows, or
a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient
basis for this creative faculty. On Sunday mornings I was always taken
to church. It was a church on the old and natural model of England,
having aisles, galleries, organ, all things ancient and venerable, and
the proportions majestic. Here, while the congregation knelt through the
long Litany, as often as we came to that passage, so beautiful among the
many that are so, where God is supplicated on behalf of 'all sick
persons and young children,' and that He 'would show His pity upon all
prisoners and captives', I wept in secret; and, raising my streaming
eyes to the windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was
shining, a sp