While the instinct of a parent’s love warmed her heart, as she pressed her infant to her bosom, the sadness of affectionate and rational solicitude stifled every sentiment of pleasure as she gazed on the altered and drooping form of her adopted daughter of the child who had already repaid the cares that had been lavished on her, and in whom she descried the promise of a plenteous harvest from the good seed she had sown.  Though Mary had been healthy in childhood, her constitution was naturally delicate, and she had latterly outgrown her strength.  The shock she had sustained by her grandfather’s death, thus operating on a weakened frame, had produced an effect apparently most alarming; and the efforts she made to exert herself only served to exhaust her.  She felt all the watchful solicitude, the tender anxieties of her aunt, and bitterly reproached herself with not better repaying these exertions for her happiness.  A thousand times she tried to analyse and extirpate the saddening impression that weighed upon her heart.

“It is not sorrow,” reasoned she with herself, “that thus oppresses me; for though I reverenced my grandfather, yet the loss of his society has scarcely been felt by me.  It cannot be fear—­the fear of death; for my soul is not so abject as to confine its desires to this sublunary scene.  What, then, is this mysterious dread that has taken possession of me?  Why do I suffer my mind to suggest to me images of horror, instead of visions of bliss?  Why can I not, as formerly, picture to myself the beauty and the brightness of a soul casting off mortality?  Why must the convulsed grasp, the stifled groan, the glaring eye, for ever come betwixt heaven and me?”

Alas!  Mary was unskilled to answer.  Hers was the season for feeling, not for reasoning.  She knew not that hers was the struggle of imagination striving to maintain its ascendency over reality.  She had heard and read, and thought and talked of death; but it was of death in its fairest form, in its softest transition:  and the veil had been abruptly torn from her eyes; the gloomy pass had suddenly disclosed itself before her, not strewed with flowers but shrouded in horrors.  Like all persons of sensibility, Mary had a disposition to view everything in a beau ideal: whether that is a boon most fraught with good or ill it were difficult to ascertain.  While the delusion lasts it is productive of pleasure to its possessor; but oh! the thousand aches that heart is destined to endure which clings to the stability and relies on the permanency of earthly happiness!  But the youthful heart must ever remain a stranger to this saddening truth.  Experience only can convince us that happiness is not a plant of this world; and that, though many an eye hath beheld its blossoms no mortal hand hath ever gathered its fruits.  This, then, was Mary’s first lesson in what is called the knowledge of life, as opposed to the beau ideal of a young and ardent imagination in love with life, and luxuriating in its own happiness.  And, upon such a mind it could not fail of producing a powerful impression.