Fearful
it is, because so often the vine must be uprooted, and all its fibres
wrenched away; but till the hour of discovery comes, how is it
transfigured by a new and beautiful life!
There is nothing in life more beautiful than that trancelike quiet dawn
which precedes the rising of love in the soul. When the whole being
is pervaded imperceptibly and tranquilly by another being, and we are
happy, we know not and ask not why, the soul is then receiving all and
asking nothing. At a later day she becomes self-conscious, and then come
craving exactions, endless questions,--the whole world of the material
comes in with its hard counsels and consultations, and the beautiful
trance fades forever.
Of course, all this is not so to you, my good friends, who read it
without the most distant idea what it can mean; but there are people in
the world to whom it has meant and will mean much, and who will see in
the present happiness of our respectable friend something even ominous
and sorrowful.
It had not escaped the keen eye of the mother how quickly and innocently
the good Doctor was absorbed by her daughter, and thereupon had come
long trains of practical reflections.
The Doctor, though not popular indeed as a preacher, was a noted man in
his age. Her deceased husband had regarded him with something of the
same veneration which might have been accorded to a divine messenger,
and Mrs. Scudder had received and kept this veneration as a precious
legacy.
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