calling up again into fierce and insufferable light the images and
features of a long-buried happiness? That would be a natural shrinking
and a reasonable weakness. But how escape from reviving, whether I give
it utterance or not, that which is for ever vividly before me? What
need to call into artificial light that which, whether sleeping or
waking, by night or by day, for eight-and-thirty years has seemed by
its miserable splendor to scorch my brain? Wherefore shrink from giving
language, simple vocal utterance, to that burden of anguish which by so
long an endurance has lost no atom of its weight, nor can gain any most
surely by the loudest publication? Need there can be none, after this,
to say that the priceless blessing, which I have left to the final
place in this ascending review, was the companion of my life--my
darling and youthful wife. Oh! dovelike woman! fated in an hour the
most defenceless to meet with the ravening vulture,--lamb fallen
amongst wolves,--trembling--fluttering fawn, whose path was inevitably
to be crossed by the bloody tiger;--angel, whose most innocent heart
fitted thee for too early a flight from this impure planet; if indeed
it were a necessity that thou shouldst find no rest for thy footing
except amidst thy native heavens, if indeed to leave what was not
worthy of thee were a destiny not to be evaded--a summons not to be put
by,--yet why, why, again and again I demand--why was it also necessary
that this, thy departure, so full of wo to me, should also to thyself
be heralded by the pangs of martyrdom? Sainted love, if, like the
ancient children of the Hebrews, like Meshech and Abednego, thou wert
called by divine command, whilst yet almost a child, to walk, and to
walk alone, through the fiery furnace,--wherefore then couldst not
thou, like that Meshech and that Abednego, walk unsinged by the
dreadful torment, and come forth unharmed? Why, if the sacrifice were
to be total, was it necessary to reach it by so dire a struggle? and if
the cup, the bitter cup, of final separation from those that were the