before) shall hold in its tiny grasp (as you have taught little dead
hands to do) fresh flowers, laughing flowers, lying lightly on the white
robe of the dear child,--all pale, cold, silent--

I had touched my Aunt Tabithy: she had dropped a stitch in her knitting.
I believe she was weeping.

--Aye, this brain of ours is a master-worker, whose appliances we do not
one half know; and this heart of ours is a rare storehouse, furnishing
the brain with new material every hour of our lives; and their limits we
shall not know, until they shall end--together.

Nor is there, as many faint-hearts imagine, but one phase of earnestness
in our life of feeling. One train of deep emotion cannot fill up the
heart: it radiates like a star, God-ward and earth-ward. It spends and
reflects all ways. Its force is to be reckoned not so much by token as
by capacity. Facts are the poorest and most slumberous evidences of
passion or of affection. True feeling is ranging everywhere; whereas
your actual attachments are too apt to be tied to sense.

A single affection may indeed be true, earnest, and absorbing; but such
an one, after all, is but a type--and if the object be worthy, a
glorious type--of the great book of feeling: it is only the vapor from
the caldron of the heart, and bears no deeper relation to its
exhaustless sources than the letter, which my pen makes, bears to the
thought that inspires it,--or than a single morning strain of your
orioles and thrushes bears to that wide bird-chorus which is making
every sunrise a worship, and every grove a temple!

My Aunt Tabithy nodded.