journey, who challenged the stage company to guess where he was going.
They guessed aright, "To see your mother." "Yes," said he, "she is
ninety-two, but has good eyesight still, they say. I have not seen her
these forty years, and I thought I could not die in peace without." I
should have liked his picture painted as a companion-piece to that of
a boisterous little boy, whom I saw attempt to declaim at a school
exhibition--

"O that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last."


He got but very little way before sudden tears shamed him from the
stage.

Some gleams of the same expression which shone down upon his infancy,
angelically pure and benign, visit Man again with hopes of pure love,
of a holy marriage. Or, if not before, in the eyes of the mother of
his child they again are seen, and dim fancies pass before his mind,
that Woman may not have been born for him alone, but have come from
heaven, a commissioned soul, a messenger of truth and love; that she
can only make for him a home in which he may lawfully repose, in so
far as she is

"True to the kindred points of Heaven and home."


In gleams, in dim fancies, this thought visits the mind of common men.
It is soon obscured by the mists of sensuality, the dust of routine,
and he thinks it was only some meteor or ignis fatuus that shone. But,