would have wept not for your own; over whose pure and unvexed sleep you
have watched and prayed, and, as it lay before you thus still and
unconscious of your vigil, have shaped out, oh, such bright hopes for
its future lot,--would you not rather that while thus young and
innocent, not a care tasted, not a crime incurred, it went down at once
into the dark grave? Would you not rather suffer this grief, bitter
though it be, than watch the predestined victim grow and ripen, and wind
itself more and more around your heart, and when it is of full and
mature age, and you yourself are stricken by years, and can form no new
ties to replace the old that are severed, when woes have already bowed
the darling of your hope, whom woe never was to touch, when sins have
already darkened the bright, seraph, unclouded heart which sin never was
to dim,--behold it sink day by day altered, diseased, decayed, into the
tomb which its childhood had in vain escaped? Answer me: would not the
earlier fate be far gentler than the last? And if you /have/ known and
wept over that early tomb, if you have seen the infant flower fade away
from the green soil of your affections; if you have missed the bounding
step, and the laughing eye, and the winning mirth which made this
sterile world a perpetual holiday,--Mother of the Lost, if you have
known, and you still pine for these, answer me yet again! Is it not a
comfort, even while you mourn, to think of all that that breast, now so
silent, has escaped? The cream, the sparkle, the elixir of life, it had
already quaffed: is it not sweet to think it shunned the wormwood and
the dregs? Answer me, even though the answer be in tears! Mourner,
your child was to you what my early and only love was to me; and could
you pierce down, down through a thousand fathom of ebbing thought, to
the far depths of my heart, you would there behold a sorrow /and a
consolation/ that have something in unison with your own!

When the light of the next morning broke into our room, Isora was still