The grief which she feels nearly crushes her spirit and evokes the sympathies of her neighbors, as well it may.  She finds a bitterness within her heart which it is difficult to sweeten into resignation.  Why should the blow have singled her as its object?  Then, with the lapse of the days, comes a change of the season, and the wonderful climatic effects on both mind and body accompanying them.  She wanders into the woods, and the rustling of the leaves beneath her feet betrays her from her dead husband for the first time, and her

CONSCIENCE, THE SOLEMN OFFICER

of her moral nature, suddenly arrests a little girl wandering in the woods in search of a butternut tree which lives like a hermit in the deep of the forest.  It is a stray memory of herself in the long ago!  It has wandered into her house of grief, and when it falls under the hand of the law she feels great guilt for having harbored it.  “O, my poor, dear husband, have I so forgotten you?” she cries in mental sackcloth and ashes.  And then the frailty of human reason and action appear before her and appall her.  The time flies by.  Soon still another season is here, with

A TROOP OF LITTLE TRAITORS, HAPPY MEMORIES,

carrying her “over the hills and far away” into that dim past whence she emerged, all happiness and health.  The conscience now has loosened its harsh rule.  The memories play in her brain like children on a lawn, and their merry music often drowns the dirges still sadly chanted in her deeper soul.  And thus the winter passes—­not in a whirlwind of grief as did the summer, whose days she never saw, or will not know she saw, until they come again hot and heavy with the association of her bitterness.  But it is safe to say her dread of those days will exceed the actual grief they cause her, and she can soon look back upon her sorrow, and say that she has mourned

RATHER NOT ENOUGH THAN TOO MUCH.

If there be joined to this a new association, one that nature and God have both approved, then there is lifted up the sneer of the world, and again the weakness of woman, the frivolity of humanity, is deplored by those who demand that grief shall co-survive with remembrance.  We do not suffer so much as we think we ought to, and yet, foolish and illogical, we call upon our fate in a grand monotony of complaint at the heaviness of our ills.  The young man falls in love.  His love is not returned.  He has believed himself capable of undying and unalterable affection for a maiden.  Unselfish, therefore, it must endure, whether she love him or not, for

HAS HE NOT PROCLAIMED IT TO HIS OWN SOUL?

She loves him not!  The test is come.  He must despise himself as a shallow-hearted hind, or dwell in extacies of adoration over one who will resign herself into the keeping of another, a thing most detestable to this young man.  Either horn of the dilemma shows him life, true life.  Not a poem or a dream, but as a range of mountains would form if they were piled down from some other world; first a row of little peaks, then monster heights arising where valleys hid, and valleys forming on the points of peaks.