find it growing from such seed.

Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more
potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show
a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to
swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them!
For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of
our too-long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and
Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social retributions
which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker! Bright and blest
the morning that should rise on such a night: for men, delayed no more
by stumbling-blocks of their own making, which are but specks of dust
upon the path between them and eternity, would then apply themselves,
like creatures of one common origin, owing one duty to the Father of one
family, and tending to one common end, to make the world a better place!

Not the less bright and blest would that day be for rousing some who
never have looked out upon the world of human life around them, to a
knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted
with a perversion of nature in their own contracted sympathies and
estimates; as great, and yet as natural in its development when once
begun, as the lowest degradation known.'

But no such day had ever dawned on Mr Dombey, or his wife; and the
course of each was taken.

Through six months that ensued upon his accident, they held the same
relations one towards the other. A marble rock could not have stood more
obdurately in his way than she; and no chilled spring, lying uncheered
by any ray of light in the depths of a deep cave, could be more sullen
or more cold than he.

The hope that had fluttered within her when the promise of her new home
dawned, was quite gone from the heart of Florence now. That home was
nearly two years old; and even the patient trust that was in her,
could not survive the daily blight of such experience. If she had any
lingering fancy in the nature of hope left, that Edith and her father
might be happier together, in some distant time, she had none, now, that
her father would ever love her. The little interval in which she had
imagined that she saw some small relenting in him, was forgotten in the
long remembrance of his coldness since and before, or only remembered as
a sorrowful delusion.

Florence loved him still, but, by degrees, had come to love