ou a mother? If
so, answer me one question: Would you not rather that the child whom
you have cherished with your soul's care, whom you have nurtured at
your bosom, whose young joys your eyes have sparkled to behold, whose
lightest grief you have wept to witness as you would have wept not for
your own; over whose pure and unvexed sleep you have watched and prayed,
and, as it lay before you thus still and unconscious of your vigil, have
shaped out, oh, such bright hopes for its future lot,--would you not
rather that while thus young and innocent, not a care tasted, not a
crime incurred, it went down at once into the dark grave? Would you
not rather suffer this grief, bitter though it be, than watch the
predestined victim grow and ripen, and wind itself more and more around
your heart, and when it is of full and mature age, and you yourself are
stricken by years, and can form no new ties to replace the old that are
severed, when woes have already bowed the darling of your hope, whom woe
never was to touch, when sins have already darkened the bright, seraph,
unclouded heart which sin never was to dim,--behold it sink day by day
altered, diseased, decayed, into the tomb which its childhood had in
vain escaped? Answer me: would not the earlier fate be far gentler than
the last? And if you _have_ known and wept over that early tomb, if
you have seen the infant flower fade away from the green soil of your
affections; if you have missed the bounding step, and the laughing
eye, and the winning mirth which made this sterile world a perpetual
holiday,--Mother of the Lost, if you have known, and you still pine for
these, answer me yet again! Is it not a comfort, even while you mourn,
to think of all that that breast, now so silent, has escaped? The cream,
the sparkle, the elixir of life, it had already quaffed: is it not sweet
to think it shunned the wormwood and the dregs? Answer me, even though
the answer be in tears! Mourner, your child was to you what my early and
only love was to me; and could you pierce down, down through a thousand
fathom of ebbing thought, to the far depths of my heart, you would there
behold a sorrow _and a consolation_ that have something in unison with
your own!

When the light of the next morning broke into our room, Isora was still
sleeping. Have you ever observed that the young, seen asleep and by the
morning light, seem much younger even than they are? partly because the
air and the light sleep of da