Essays by Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell
page 150 of 206 (72%)
page 150 of 206 (72%)
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committed to its trust--." She boasts of her country in lofty phrase:
"God hath, as it were, enclosed a people here, out of the waste common of the world." And again of her husband: "It will be as hard to say which was the predominant virtue in him as which is so in its own nature." "He had made up his accounts with life and death, and fixed his purpose to entertain both honourably." "The heat of his youth a little inclined him to the passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of love and grief; but reason was never dethroned by them, but continued governor and moderator of his soul." She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had "conceived a kindness" for her lord, their susceptibility, their willingness, their "admirable tempting beauty," and "such excellent good-nature as would have thawed a rock of ice"; but she adds no less beautifully, "It was not his time to love." In her widowhood she remembered that she had been commanded "not to grieve at the common rate of women"; and this is the lovely phrase of her grief: "As his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken to that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing." She has an invincible anger against the enemies of her husband and of the cause. The fevers, "little less than plagues," that were common in that age carry them off exemplarily by families at a time. An adversary is "the devil's exquisite solicitor." All Royalists are of "the wicked faction." She suspected his warders of poisoning Colonel Hutchinson in the prison wherein he died. The keeper had given him, under pretence of kindness, a bottle of excellent wine, and the two gentlemen who drank of it died within four months. A poison of strange operation! "We must leave it to the great day, when all crimes, how secret soever, will be made manifest, whether they added poison to all their other iniquity, |
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