Then comes up that sweetest and brightest vision of love, and the doubt and care which ran before it,—­when your hope groped eagerly through your pride and worldliness toward the sainted purity of her whom you know to be—­all too good,—­when you trembled at the thought of your own vices and blackness in the presence of her who seemed virtue’s self.  And even now your old heart bounds with joy as you recall the first timid assurance that you were blessed in the possession of her love, and that you might live in her smiles.

Your thought runs like floating melody over the calm joy that followed you through so many years,—­to the prattling children, who were there to bless your path.  How poor seem now your transports, as you met their childish embraces, and mingled in their childish employ; how utterly weak the actual, when compared with that glow of affection which memory lends to the scene!

Yet all this is gone; and the anxieties are gone, which knit your heart so strongly to those children, and to her—­the mother,—­anxieties which distressed you,—­which you would eagerly have shunned, yet whose memory you would not now bargain away for a king’s ransom!  What were the sunlight worth, if clouds did not sometimes hide its brightness; what were the spring, or the summer, if the lessons of the chilling winter did not teach us the story of their warmth?

The days are gone too, in which you may have lingered under the sweet suns of Italy,—­with the cherished one beside you, and the eager children, learning new prattle in the soft language of those Eastern lands.  The evenings are gone, in which you loitered under the trees with those dear ones under the light of a harvest-moon, and talked of your blooming hopes, and of the stirring plans of your manhood.  There are no more ambitious hopes, no more sturdy plans!  Life’s work has rounded into the evening that shortens labor.

And as you loiter in dreams over the wide waste of what is gone,—­a mingled array of griefs and of joys, of failures and of triumphs,—­you bless God that there has been so much of joy belonging to your shattered life; and you pray God, with the vain fondness that belongs to a parent’s heart, that more of joy, and less of toil, may come near to the cherished ones who bear up your hope and name.

And with your silent prayer come back the old teachings, and vagaries of the boyish heart in its reaches toward Heaven.  You recall the old church-reckoning of your goodness:  is there much more of it now than then?  Is not Heaven just as high, and the world as sadly broad?

Alas, for the poor tale of goodness which age brings to the memory!  There may be crowning acts of benevolence, shining here and there; but the margin of what has not been done is very broad.  How weak and insignificant seems the story of life’s goodness and profit, when Death begins to slant his shadow upon our souls!  How infinite in the comparison seems that Eternal goodness which is crowned with mercy.  How self vanishes, like a blasted thing, and only lives—­if it lives at all—­in the glow of that redeeming light which radiates from the CROSS and the THRONE!