I
would try to describe my mother. Were I to _speak_ of her, my voice
would choke at the mention of her name. As I write, a mist gathers over
my eyes. Grief for the loss of such a being is immortal, as the love of
which it is born.

I have said that we were poor,--but ours was not abject poverty,
hereditary poverty,--though _I_ had never known affluence, or even that
sufficiency which casts out the fear of want. I knew that my mother was
the child of wealth, and that she had been nurtured in elegance and
splendor. I inherited from her the most fastidious tastes, without the
means of gratifying them. I felt that I had a right to be wealthy, and
that misfortune alone had made my mother poor, had made her an alien
from her kindred and the scenes of her nativity. I felt a strange pride
in this conviction. Indeed there was a singular union of pride and
diffidence in my character, that kept me aloof from my young companions,
and closed up the avenues to the social joys of childhood.

My mother thought a school life would counteract the influence of her
own solitary habits and example. She did not wish me to be a hermit
child, and for this reason accepted the offer Mr. Regulus made through
the minister to become a pupil in the academy. She might have sent me to
the free schools in the neighborhood, but she did not wish me to form
associations incompatible with the refinement she had so carefully
cultivated in me. She might have continued to teach me at home, for she
was mistress of every accomplishment, but she thought the discipline of
an institution like this would give tone and firmness to my poetic and
dreaming mind. She wanted me to become practical,--she wanted to see the
bark growing and hardening over the exposed and delicate fibres. She
anticipated for me the cold winds and beating rains of an adverse
destiny. I knew she did, though she had never told me so in words. I
read it in the anxious, wistful, prophetic expression of her soft, deep
black eyes, whenever they rested on me. Those beautiful, mysterious
eyes!

There was a mystery about her that gave power to her excellence and
beauty. Through the twilight shades of her sorrowful loneliness, I could
trace only the dim outline of her past life. I was fatherless,--and
annihilation, as well as death, seemed the doom of him who had given me
being. I was forbidden to mention his name. No similitude of his
features, no token of his existence, cherished by love and hal