Memory was plying her busy fingers among the withered leaves of what was once the gay and glorious blossoming of youth, and retrospection sternly casting accounts of the blighted joys, bleeding affections and blasted hopes of a life that had promised at its opening to be as bright and beautiful as Mrs. Claremont's. How vividly rose to mind the bright anticipations with which she had stepped from the threshold of a dear and luxurious home, to share the destiny of one whom she reverenced as the embodiment of all that is great and noble, and what a destiny it had been! Then how quickly faded the memory of his faults and vices before that overpowering love which sought to palliate them through the mediation of surrounding influences or some short-coming of its own, and which magnified his virtues in the same proportion.
It is no blind idolatry that makes the virtues of departed ones so far outweigh their faults to surviving friends, but a prophetic intuition soaring to the higher life the spirit attains as it ascends from the ills flesh is heir to, which beholds it transfigured into the divine symmetry designed by its original Architect, and which is the birth-right of immortality.
It is hard to conquer human nature. How fondly we cling to the perishing clay even when wasted by disease, and the mental faculties are impaired by suffering, with a strength of affection unknown before. It is the conflict of flesh with spirit, of mortality with immortality—a crisis of love.
Mrs. Crawford was too much prostrated, mentally
