yet soul for soul which was greater, Rachel of Castlewood or Jeanie
Deans? Lady Castlewood must be taken at the chief moment in Esmond,
when she says to Esmond: "To-day, Henry, in the anthem when they
sang, 'When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion we were like them
that dream'--I thought, yes, like them that dream, and then it went,
'They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth forth
and weepeth, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his
sheaves with him.' I looked up from the book and saw you; I was not
surprised when I saw you, I knew you would come, my dear, and I saw
the gold sunshine round your head."

That she said as she laughed and sobbed, crying out wildly, "Bringing
your sheaves with you, your sheaves with you." And this again, as
Esmond thinks of her, is surely beaten gold. "Gracious God, who was
he, weak and friendless creature, that such a love should be poured
out upon him; not in vain, not in vain has he lived that such a
treasure be given him? What is ambition compared to that but selfish
vanity? To be rich, to be famous: what do these profit a year hence
when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away
under the ground along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin?
Only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret
blessing or precedes you and intercedes for you. 'Non omnis moriar'-
-if dying I yet live in a tender heart or two, nor am lost and
hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for
me." This seems to me the second finest passage in English fiction,
and the finest is when Jeanie Deans went to London and pleaded with
the Queen for the life of her condemned sister, for is there any plea
in all literature so eloquent in pathos and so true to human nature
as this, when the Scottish peasant girl poured forth her heart:
"When the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body--and