all.  So much the brighter, doubtless, the glad surprise of the transition.  Oh, how one longs for permission to look in at heaven’s opened door-way after the entrance of such souls!

1st Mo. 23d.  To-day, writing rhyming Irish, appeal.  It got the upper hand and made me sin—­so unhappy about it.  When I believe sincerely desiring to offer it up to the Lord’s, will, I grew easy to continue it.  Perhaps it was a selfish and self-pleasing influence, but I think not so.  I felt very glad afterwards to be able to ask to have all my heart consecrated by the Lord’s spirit; and I do believe that to rectify, not extinguish, the beat of oar facilities, is religion’s work.

This appeal on behalf of the poor Irish was never made public.  It had occupied her thoughts very deeply, and, had she seen fit to publish it, might have been an auxiliary to the material efforts on behalf of the sufferers in which she, in common with many others at that period, was warmly engaged.

Many visits to poor people.  In some I felt able to talk to them of heavenly things.  I believe it is right to speak in love and interest, but never to out-strip our feelings.  “I was sick, and ye visited me,” refers to a duty; and surely, when we are blessed with a knowledge of the way of salvation, and feel anxious for the salvation of others, it is right to do our endeavors; at the same time well knowing that God only can touch the heart.  I believe that indifference and indolence do much shelter themselves under pretence of leaving God’s work to Himself.  I have often learned salutary lessons in doing my little.

2d Mo. 19th.  I have been musing upon “my sorrow was stirred.”  Can it be that every heart is a treasury of sadness which has but to be stirred up to set us in mourning?  Is it proportionate to the amount of evil?  Does a certain amount of evil necessarily bring a certain amount of sorrow soon or late?  Do we suffer only by our own fault, unless a grief is actually inflicted upon us?  I think not.  There may be mental storms, over-castings of cloud in the mind’s hemisphere, independent of the exhalations from the soil.

  2d Mo. 23d.  Letter to M.B.

* * * The truth is, that I was once fonder of reading than of almost any thing else. * * * I don’t know how to tell thee about the strangely sad impression that has followed, that “this also is vanity.”  I know it is our duty to improve our minds, and I wish much that mine had been better cultivated than it has been, and yet some utilitarian infirmity of mind has so often suggested, “What use is it?” while I have been reading, that my zest for the book has been almost destroyed, and the very thought of the volume has been saddened by remembering what I felt while reading it.  So that what E. Barrett says of light reading is true to me of Schiller and some others:—­

  “Merry books once read for pastime,
    If we dared to read again,
  Only memories of the last time,
    Would swim darkly up the brain.”