red and drooping form of her adopted daughter of the child who had
already repaid the cares that had been lavished on her, and in whom she
descried the promise of a plenteous harvest from the good seed she had
sown. Though Mary had been healthy in childhood, her constitution was
naturally delicate, and she had latterly outgrown her strength. The
shock she had sustained by her grandfather's death, thus operating on a
weakened frame, had produced an effect apparently most alarming; and the
efforts she made to exert herself only served to exhaust her. She felt
all the watchful solicitude, the tender anxieties of her aunt, and
bitterly reproached herself with not better repaying these exertions for
her happiness. A thousand times she tried to analyse and extirpate the
saddening impression that weighed upon her heart.

"It is not sorrow," reasoned she with herself, "that thus oppresses me;
for though I reverenced my grandfather, yet the loss of his society has
scarcely been felt by me. It cannot be fear--the fear of death; for my
soul is not so abject as to confine its desires to this sublunary scene.
What, then, is this mysterious dread that has taken possession of me?
Why do I suffer my mind to suggest to me images of horror, instead of
visions of bliss? Why can I not, as formerly, picture to myself the
beauty and the brightness of a soul casting off mortality? Why must the
convulsed grasp, the stifled groan, the glaring eye, for ever come
betwixt heaven and me?"

Alas! Mary was unskilled to answer. Hers was the season for feeling, not
for reasoning. She knew not that hers was the struggle of imagination
striving to maintain its ascendency over reality. She had heard and
read, and thought and talked of death; but it was of death in its
fairest form, in its softest transition: and the veil had been abruptly
torn from her eyes; the gloomy pass had suddenly disclosed itself before
her, not strewed with flowers but shrouded in horrors. Like all persons
of sensibility, Mary had a disposition to view everything in a _beau
ideal:_ whether that is a boon most fraught with good or ill it were
difficult to ascertain. While the delusion lasts it is productive of
pleasure to its possessor; but oh! the thousand aches that heart is
destined to endure which clings to the stability and relies on the
permanency of earthly happiness! But the youthful heart must ever remain
a stranger to this saddening truth. Experience only can convince us