about to cause her heart to despair of all the labor she had taken under the sun.” Had she not emerged from this valley of the shadow of death, and come on to a higher plane of conviction and hope, her life would have been a most painful tragedy. But, when we know how she passed on and up, ever higher and higher, to the mountain-top, leaving one by one these dark ravines and mist-shrouded valleys, and ascending to where a perpetual sunshine lay, above the region of clouds, and wus able to overlook with eagle glance the widest panorama, — we can read, with sympathy indeed, but without pain, the following extracts from a journal: —
‘It was Thanksgiving day, (Nov., 1831,) and I was
obliged to go to church, or exceedingly displease my
father. I almost always suffered much in church from
a feeling of disunion with the hearers and dissent from
the preacher; but to-day, more than ever before, the
services jarred upon me from their grateful and joyful
tone. I was wearied out with mental conflicts, and in
a mood of most childish, child-like sadness. I felt
within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness;
but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized,
and as if it was impossible that they should be
used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past
was worthless, the future hopeless; yet I could not
remember ever voluntarily to have done a wrong thing,
and my aspiration seemed very high. I looked round
the church, and envied all the little children; for I
supposed they had parents who protected them, so that
they could never know this strange anguish, this dread
uncertainty. I knew not, then, that none could have
any father but God. I knew not, that I was not the
