lp you through the grievous time that must pass--a
grievous time in which you have my warm sympathy. I know only too well
all about it.

"I know my griefs; but then my consolations,
My joys, and my immortal hopes I know"--

joys unknown to the prosperous, hopes that spring from seed long buried
in the dust.

I shall read your books with great interest, I am sure, and who knows
how God means to prepare you for future usefulness along the path of
pain? "Every branch that beareth fruit He purgeth it, that it may bring
forth more fruit."

What an epitaph your boy's own words would be--"It is beautiful to be
dead"!

_To the Same, New York, Nov 30th, 1870._

I thank you so much for your letter about your precious children. I
remember them well, all three, and do not wonder that the death of your
first-born, coming upon the very footsteps of sorrow, has so nearly
crushed you. But what beautiful consolations God gave you by his dying
bed! "All safe at God's right hand!" What more can the fondest mother's
heart ask than such safety as this? I am sure that there will come to
you, sooner or later, the sense of Christ's love in these repeated
sorrows, that in your present bewildered, amazed state you can hardly
realise. Let me tell you that I have tried His heart in a long
storm--not so very different from yours--and that I know something of
its depths. I will enclose you some lines that may give you a moment's
light. Please not to let them go out of your hands, for no one--not even
my husband--has ever seen them. I am going to send my last book to your
lonely little boy. You will not feel like reading it now, but perhaps
the 33d chapter, and some that follow, may not jar upon you as the
earlier part would.

To go back again to the subject of Christ's love for us, of which I
never tire, I want to make you feel that His sufferers are His happiest,
most favored disciples. What they learn about Him---His pitifulness, His
unwillingness to hurt us, His haste to bind up the very wounds He has
inflicted---endear Him so, that at last they burst out into songs of
thanksgiving, that His "donation of bliss" included in it such donation
of pain. Perhaps I have already said to you, for I am fond of saying it,

"The love of Jesus---what it is,
Only His sufferers know."

You ask if your heart will ever be lightsome again. Never again with the
lightsomeness that had never known sorrow, but light even to gayety with
the new and