understand it; I meditated long, long upon it all in my
infantile darkness, in the garret, or in the little slip of a
cold room where my bed was now placed; and a great, blind anger
against I knew not what awakened in my soul.

The two retreats which I have mentioned were now all that were
left to me. In the back-parlour someone from outside gave me
occasional lessons of a desultory character. The breakfast-room
was often haunted by visitors, unknown to me by face or name,--
ladies, who used to pity me and even to pet me, until I became
nimble in escaping from their caresses. Everything seemed to be
unfixed, uncertain; it was like being on the platform of a
railway-station waiting for a train. In all this time, the
agitated, nervous presence of my Father, whose pale face was
permanently drawn with anxiety, added to my perturbation, and I
became miserable, stupid--as if I had lost my way in a cold fog.

Had I been older and more intelligent, of course, it might have
been of him and not of myself that I should have been thinking.
As I now look back upon that tragic time, it is for him that my
heart bleeds,--for them both, so singularly fitted as they were
to support and cheer one another in an existence which their own
innate and cultivated characteristics had made little hospitable
to other sources of comfort. This is not to be dwelt on here. But
what must be recorded was the extraordinary tranquillity, the
serene and sensible resignation, with which at length my parents
faced the awful hour. Language cannot utter what they suffered,
but there was no rebellion, no repining; in their case even an
atheist might admit that the overpowering miracle of grace was
mightily efficient.

It seems almost cruel to the memory of their opinions that the
only words which rise to my mind, the only ones which seem in the
least degree adequate to describe the attitude of my parents, had
fallen from the pen of one whom, in their want of imaginative
sympathy, they had regarded as anathema. But John Henry Newman
might have come from the contemplation of my Mother's death-bed
when he wrote: 'All the trouble which the world inflicts upon us,
and which flesh cannot but feel,--sorrow, pain, care,
bereavement,--these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the
intensity with which faith gazes at the Divine Majesty.' It was
'tranquillity', it was not the rapture of the mystic. Almost in
the last hour of her life, urged to confess her 'joy'