ooks.
Noble, generous, and self-forgetting, tender and most faithful in
friendship, burning with indignation at injustice shown to another,
longing to find virtues instead of digging for faults,--her greatest
suffering arose from pained surprise, when persons proved themselves
less noble than she had deemed them.

Her rich imagination and slender purse were open to all beggars, but for
herself she asked nothing, and was constantly a willing sufferer from
her own inability to toady a patron or to make a good bargain with a
publisher.

She felt most warmly for her friends in America, whose comprehension of
her views, and honest, open appreciation of her books, inspired her with
an ardent desire to write for them a romance in her very best manner.
She had sketched two, and, doubtful which to proceed with first,
contemplated sending both to an American friend for his decision; but
constant suffering stayed her hand.

In the early spring she grew weaker day by day, and died on the 13th of
March, at Brixton, in England, at the age of thirty-two.

Those who loved either her person or her works will find her place
forever empty.

Among her manuscript papers I found this sketch, which has a peculiar
significance now that the writer has passed away. It has never been
printed.

A NICHE IN THE HEART.

I had been wandering, almost all day, in the cathedral of a town at some
distance from London. I had sketched its carved pulpit, one or two
cherub faces looking down from its columns, some of its best reliefs,
and its oldest monument. It was evening, and I could no longer see to
draw, though pencillings of light still fell on the pavement through the
larger windows, whose colors were softened like those of the lunar
rainbow; and still the edges of the stalls were gilded with the last
gleams of sunset, though the seats were filled already with those
phantoms which twilight seems to create in such a place. The monuments
looked calmer and less formal than when daylight bared all their defects
of design or finish; they seemed now worthy of their position beneath
the vaulted roof, and even, adjuncts themselves to the harmony of the
architecture. One among them, noticeable in the daytime for its refined
workmanship, now gleamed out fresher and whiter than the rest, as was
natural, for it had been placed there but a little while; but it had
besides more _expression_, in its very simplicity, than such-like
mementos of stone or marbl