when each hour might bring the dreaded fate—­until summer, we felt sure; and this certainty, short lived as it must be, yet for awhile satisfied her maternal tenderness.  I know not how to express or communicate the sense of concentrated, intense, though evanescent transport, that imparadized us in the present hour.  Our joys were dearer because we saw their end; they were keener because we felt, to its fullest extent, their value; they were purer because their essence was sympathy—­ as a meteor is brighter than a star, did the felicity of this winter contain in itself the extracted delights of a long, long life.

How lovely is spring!  As we looked from Windsor Terrace on the sixteen fertile counties spread beneath, speckled by happy cottages and wealthier towns, all looked as in former years, heart-cheering and fair.  The land was ploughed, the slender blades of wheat broke through the dark soil, the fruit trees were covered with buds, the husbandman was abroad in the fields, the milk-maid tripped home with well-filled pails, the swallows and martins struck the sunny pools with their long, pointed wings, the new dropped lambs reposed on the young grass, the tender growth of leaves—­

  Lifts its sweet head into the air, and feeds
  A silent space with ever sprouting green.[3]

Man himself seemed to regenerate, and feel the frost of winter yield to an elastic and warm renewal of life—­reason told us that care and sorrow would grow with the opening year—­but how to believe the ominous voice breathed up with pestiferous vapours from fear’s dim cavern, while nature, laughing and scattering from her green lap flowers, and fruits, and sparkling waters, invited us to join the gay masque of young life she led upon the scene?

Where was the plague?  “Here—­every where!” one voice of horror and dismay exclaimed, when in the pleasant days of a sunny May the Destroyer of man brooded again over the earth, forcing the spirit to leave its organic chrysalis, and to enter upon an untried life.  With one mighty sweep of its potent weapon, all caution, all care, all prudence were levelled low:  death sat at the tables of the great, stretched itself on the cottager’s pallet, seized the dastard who fled, quelled the brave man who resisted:  despondency entered every heart, sorrow dimmed every eye.

Sights of woe now became familiar to me, and were I to tell all of anguish and pain that I witnessed, of the despairing moans of age, and the more terrible smiles of infancy in the bosom of horror, my reader, his limbs quivering and his hair on end, would wonder how I did not, seized with sudden frenzy, dash myself from some precipice, and so close my eyes for ever on the sad end of the world.  But the powers of love, poetry, and creative fancy will dwell even beside the sick of the plague, with the squalid, and with the dying.  A feeling of devotion, of duty, of a high and steady purpose, elevated me; a strange joy filled my heart.  In the midst of saddest