hus stowed away. How
mysterious it seemed to me that poor families every winter should be
shivering, freezing, and catching cold, when Nature had all this latent
caloric locked up in her store-closet,--when it was all around them, in
everything they touched and handled!

In the spiritual world there is an exact analogy to this. There is a
great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human
hearts dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power,
till set free by expression.

Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day, just before a snow-storm, sit at
work in a room that was judiciously warmed by an exact thermometer? You
do not freeze, but you shiver; your fingers do not become numb with
cold, but you have all the while an uneasy craving for more positive
warmth. You look at the empty grate, walk mechanically towards it, and,
suddenly awaking, shiver to see that there is nothing there. You long
for a shawl or cloak; you draw yourself within yourself; you consult the
thermometer, and are vexed to find that there is nothing there to be
complained of,--it is standing most provokingly at the exact temperature
that all the good books and good doctors pronounce to be the proper
thing,--the golden mean of health; and yet perversely you shiver, and
feel as if the face of an open fire would be to you as the smile of an
angel.

Such a lifelong chill, such an habitual shiver, is the lot of many
natures, which are not warm, when all ordinary rules tell them they
ought to be warm,--whose life is cold and barren and meagre,--which
never see the blaze of an open fire.

I will illustrate my meaning by a page out of my own experience.

I was twenty-one when I stood as groomsman for my youngest and favorite
sister Emily. I remember her now as she stood at the altar,--a pale,
sweet, flowery face, in a half-shimmer between smiles and tears, looking
out of vapory clouds of gauze and curls and all the vanishing mysteries
of a bridal morning.

Everybody thought the marriage such a fortunate one!--for her husband
was handsome and manly, a man of worth, of principle good as gold and
solid as adamant,--and Emmy had always been such a flossy little kitten
of a pet, so full of all sorts of impulses, so sensitive and nervous, we
thought her kind, strong, composed, stately husband made just on purpose
for her. "It was quite a Providence," sighed all the elderly ladies, who
sniffed tenderly, and wiped their eyes, according