March 8, 1891.

Something—­far-off, faint, joyful—­cried out suddenly in the depths of my spirit to-day.  I felt—­I can but express it by images, for it was too intangible for direct utterance—­as a woman feels when her child’s life quickens within her; as a traveller’s heart leaps up when, lost among interminable hills, he is hailed by a friendly voice; as the river-water, thrust up into creeks and estuaries by the incoming tide, is suddenly freed by the ebb from that stealthy pressure, and flows gladly downwards; as the dark garden-ground may feel when the frozen soil melts under warm winds of spring, and the flower-roots begin to swell and shoot.

Some such thrill it was that moved in the silence of the soul, showing that the darkness was alive.

It came upon me as I walked among soft airs to-day.  It was no bodily lightness that moved me, for I was unstrung, listless, indolent; but it was a sense that it was good to live, lonely and crushed as I was; that there was something waiting for me which deserved to be approached with a patient expectation—­that life was enriched, rather than made desolate by my grief and losses; that I had treasure laid up in heaven.  It came upon me as a fancy, but it was something better than that, that one or other of my dear ones had perhaps awaked in the other world, and had sent out a thought in search of me.  I had often thought that if, when we are born into this world of ours, our first years are so dumb and unperceptive, it might be even so in the world beyond; that we are there allowed to rest a little, to sleep; and that has seemed to me to be perhaps the explanation why, in those first sad days of grief, when the mourner aches to have some communication with the vanished soul, and when the soul that has passed the bounds of life would be desiring too, one would think, to send some message back, why, I say, there is no voice nor hint nor sign.  Perhaps the reason why our grief loses its sting after a season is that the soul we have loved does contrive to send some healing influence into the desolate heart.

I know not; but as I stood upon the hill-top to-day at evening, the setting sun gilding the cloud-edges, and touching the horizon with a delicate misty azure, my spirit did indeed awake with a smile, with a murmured word of hope.

If I, who have lost everything that can enrich and gladden life, can yet feel that inalienable residue of hope, which just turns the balance on the side of desiring still to live, it must be that life has something yet in store for me—­I do not hope for love, I do not desire the old gift of expression again; but there is something to learn, to apprehend, to understand.  I have learnt, I think, not to grasp at anything, not to clasp anything close to my heart; the dream of possession has fled from me; it will be enough if, as I learn the lesson, I can ease a few burdens and help frail feet along the road.  Duty, pleasure, work—­strange names which