[Illustration:  SORROW.]

THERE IS ANOTHER AND AN UNHAPPY PHASE

of sorrow.  “When it is real,” says Madame Swetchine, “it is almost as difficult to discover as real poverty.  An instinctive delicacy hides the rags of the one and the wounds of the other.”  “The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue hath it,” says the Talmud.  “Light griefs do speak,” says Seneca, “while sorrow’s tongue is bound.”  “The wringing of the hands and knocking of the breast,” says Dr. South, “or the wishing of one’s self unborn:  all are but the ceremonies of sorrow, the pomp and ostentation of an effeminate grief, which speak not so much the greatness of the misery as the smallness of the mind.”

NOW COMES RELIGION,

shining down into this Alpine valley of grief, not as the sun of the Alps, but as a continual orb of light; not between a few short hours in a “long, long weary day,” but as a constant illumination of the soul, irradiating its beams out upon the countenances of God’s afflicted, and setting them before mankind as a beacon for groping humanity.  I know of no more perfect expression of the power of sorrow to chasten the soul and draw it nearer the Maker than is contained in

MARIA LOWELL’S “LAMB IN THE SHEPHERD’S ARMS.”

I quote it as giving that lesson which my humble prose would never teach: 

     1.  After our child’s untroubled breath
          Up to the Father took its way,
        And on our home the shade of death,
          Like a long twilight, haunting lay,

        And friends came round with us to weep
          Her little spirit’s swift remove,
        This story of the Alpine sheep
          Was told to us by one we love: 

     2.  They, in the valley’s sheltering care,
          Soon crop the meadow’s tender prime,
        And, when the sod grows brown and bare,
          The shepherd strives to make them climb
        To airy shelves of pastures green
          That hang along the mountain-side,
        Where grass and flowers together lean,
          And down through mist the sunbeams glide.

     3.  But nought can tempt the timid things
          That steep and rugged path to try,
        Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings,
          And seared below the pastures lie;
        Till in his arms their lambs he takes
          Along the dizzy verge to go,—­
        Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks,
          They follow on o’er rock and snow;

     4.  And, in those pastures lifted fair,
          More dewy soft than lowland mead,
        The shepherd drops his lowly care,
          And sheep and lambs together feed. 
        This parable by Nature breathed
          Blew on me as the south wind free
        O’er frozen brooks that float unsheathed
          From icy thralldom to the sea.