s iteration of the
letter which killeth. But her realization of the solemn significance of
the great fact of being alive deepened every hour; her tenderness, her
sense of brotherhood to every human being, and her sense of the actual
presence and near love of God. Her old intolerance was softened, or rather
it had changed from antagonisms on the surface to living principles at the
core. Truth, truth, truth, was still the war-cry of her soul; and there
was an intensity in every word of her written or spoken pleadings on this
subject which might well have revealed to a careful analyzer of them that
they had sprung out of the depths of the profoundest experiences. Her
influence as a writer was very great. As she grew older, she wrote less
and less for the delight of the ear, more and more for the stirring of the
heart. To do a little towards making people glad, towards making them kind
to one another, towards opening their eyes to the omnipresent
beauty,--these were her ambitions. "Oh, the tender, unutterable beauty of
all created things!" were the opening lines of one of her sweetest songs;
and it might have been said to be one of the watchwords of her life.

It took many years for her to reach this plane, to attain to the fulness
of this close spiritual communion with things seen and unseen. The double
bereavement and strain of her two years of life in Penfield left her for a
long time bruised and sore. Her relation with Stephen, as she looked back
upon it, hurt her in every fibre of her nature. Sometimes she was filled
with remorse for the grief she had caused him, and sometimes with poignant
distress, of doubt whether she had not after all been unjust to him.
Underlying all this remorse, all this doubt was a steadily growing
consciousness that her love for him was in the very outset a mistake, an
abnormal emotion, born of temporary and insufficient occasion, and
therefore sure to have sooner or later proved too weak for the tests of
life. On the other hand, her thoughts of Parson Dorrance grew constantly
warmer, tenderer, more assured. His character, his love for her, his
beautiful life, rose steadily higher and higher, and brighter and brighter
on her horizon, as the lofty snow-clad peaks of a mountain land reveal
themselves in all their grandeur to our vision only when we have journeyed
away from their base. Slowly the whole allegiance of her heart transferred
itself to the dead man's memory; slowly her grief for his lo