with this suspicion, sprung up a lingering dissatisfaction, a longing
for something which no words of mine could define.

How clearly does this epoch of my life stand forth from the dreary
background of experience as I look at it from the watch-tower of
to-day? How I know now that this was the farewell passage of my
childhood, which was winging its flight, and leaving me to struggle
with the naked realities of life, which had hitherto been hidden and
undreamt of mysteries to me.

Ah! that passage of childhood, what a void it makes in the growing
heart; and how quietly its place is filled by unworthier influences.
Does all the abstract wealth, which there might be in the growth and
development of those who learn the alphabet of life upon our knee,
take one pang from the natural and pardonable sorrow with which we
watch the heavy footprint of an inevitable experience, crushing out
the last frail remnant of childhood from the hearts of those who such
a little while before were our "little ones?"

There is something far more appealing to the parent's heart in the
half worn stocking of the child who toddled from its cradle to its
grave, than in the mighty quill of her grey-haired poet son, rusted
though it be in the service of his art. In the broken stem of an
unfinished life, a mother mourns a host of possibilities that can
never now be realized; if we may credit the prophecies of such
sorrowing mothers who, bending over the cradle from which some
baby-spirit has just passed into the kingdom of the little ones, tell
in broken accents of sorrow and regret of all the promises of goodness
and greatness which have been sacrificed with that life, we must truly
admit that the world in all its wealth of heroes, bold and brave, its