Yes, all is hopeless, man with vain endeavor,
    May climb earth’s rugged heights, but climb to fall;
  Ever perfecting, yet imperfect ever,
    Earth has no rest for man—­if earth be all.

  Yet oft there dwell, in temples frail and mortal,
    Souls that partake immortal life the while;
  Nor wait till death unbar heaven’s pearly portal,
    For heaven’s own essence, their Redeemer’s smile.

  _—­12th Month_, 1844.

* * * * *

From the Journal relating to daily affairs, at this time, kept distinct from her spiritual diary, the following, and a few other extracts, have been taken.  Never suspecting that this would see the light, she left it in an unfinished state.  Had it been reconsidered, portions of it would probably have been altered; but it sufficiently shows her desire to understand the agencies of intellectual action, and the philosophy of knowing and acquiring.  She recognizes the importance of systematic knowledge, questions the purpose and use of every attainment, and manifests throughout a desire that all the operations of the intelligence may subserve a nobler aim than knowledge in itself possesses:—­

5th Mo. 16th.  That life is a real, earnest thing, and to be employed for our own and others’ real and earnest good, is a fact which I desire may be more deeply engraven on my heart.  It is certainly a matter of spiritual duty, to look well to the outward state of our own house.  There are already many revolutions in my mental history, passed beyond the reach of any thing but regrets.  As a child, play was not my chief pleasure, but a sort of mingled play and constructiveness; then reading and learning; I well remember the coming on of the desire to know.  In a tale, false or true, I had by no means, the common share of pleasure—­Smith’s Key to Reading was more to my taste.  Poetry I have ever loved.  History I am very dull at; a chain of events is far more difficult to follow, than a chain of ideas—­causality comes more to my aid than eventuality.  Well, the age of learning came:  in it I learned this, that, and the other; but, alas! order, the faculty in which I am so deficient, was wanting, I had not an appointed place for each fact or idea:  so they were lost as they fell into the confused mass.  I am full of dim apprehensions on almost all subjects, but know little of any.  However, it may be that this favors new combinations of things.  I would rather have all my ideas in a mass, than have them in separate locked boxes, where they must each remain isolated; but it were better they were on open shelves, and that I had power to take them down, and combine at will.  The age of combining has come; I feel sensibly the diminution of the power of acquiring:  I can do little in that, but lament that I have acquired so little; but I seem rebuked in myself at the incessant wish to gain—­gain for what?  I must do