THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S LIFE.

Cambridge:

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND 23, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON.

1859.

249. x. 199.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

"To burn away, in mad waste, the divine

aromas and plainly celestial elements from our existence; to change our holy-of-holies into a

place of riot; to make the soul itself hard, impious, barren! Surely a day is coming, when it will be known again what virtue is in purity and continente of life; how divine is the blush of young human cheeks; how high, beneficent, sternly inexorable if forgotten, is the duty laid, not on Women only, but on every creature, in regard to these particulars? Well;

if such a day never come again, then I perceive

much else will never come. Magnanimity and
depth of insight will never come; heroic purity
of heart and of eye; noble pious valour, to

amend us and the age of bronze and lacker,
how can they ever come ?
The scandalous

bronze-lacker age of hungry animalisms, spiri

tual impotencies and mendacities, will have to

run its course, till the Pit swallow it."

CARLYLE. History of Friedrich II. Vol. ii. pp. 29, 30.

She sat and wept beside His feet; the weight Of sin oppress'd her heart; for all the blame, And the poor malice of the worldly shame, To her was past, extinct, and out of date, Only the SIN remain'd,—the leprous state; She would be melted by the heat of love, By fires far fiercer than are blown to prove And purge the silver ore adulterate.

She sat and wept, and with her untress'd hair Still wiped the feet she was so blest to touch; And He wiped off the soiling of despair

From her sweet soul, because she loved so much.

I am a sinner, full of doubts and fears,
Make me a humble thing of love and tears.

H. COLERIDGE.-Poems. Vol. ii. p. 387.