majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt through the long litany, as
often as we came to that passage, so beautiful amongst many that are so,
where God is supplicated on behalf of "all sick persons and young
children," and that he would "show his pity upon all prisoners and
captives," I wept in secret; and raising my streaming eyes to the upper
windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a
spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The sides of the
windows were rich with storied glass; through the deep purples and
crimsons streamed the golden light; emblazonries of heavenly illumination
(from the sun) mingling with the earthly emblazonries (from art and its
gorgeous coloring) of what is grandest in man. _There_ were the apostles
that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial
love to man. _There_ were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth
through flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce, insulting
faces. _There_ were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, had
glorified God by meek submission to his will. And all the time, whilst
this tumult of sublime memorials held on as the deep chords from some
accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field of the
window, where the glass was _uncolored_, white, fleecy clouds sailing
over the azure depths of the sky: were it but a fragment or a hint of
such a cloud, immediately under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it
grew and shaped itself into visions of beds with white lawny curtains;
and in the beds lay sick children, dying children, that were tossing in
anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious
reason, could not suddenly release them from their pain; but he suffered
the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the
beds ascended into the chambers of the air; slowly, also, his arms
descended from the heavens, that he and his young children, whom in
Palestine, once and forever, he had blessed, though they _must_ pass
slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the