Harriet Beecher Stowe : Three Novels (147 page)

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Authors: Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Page 841
"I will not recapitulate what I have already written,the wonderful manner in which I was saved, and in which friends and help and prosperity and worldly success came to me again, after life had seemed all lost; but now I am ready to return to my country, and I feel as Jacob did when he said, 'With my staff I passed over this Jordan, and now I am become two bands.'
"I do not need any arguments now to convince me that the Bible is from above. There is a great deal in it that I cannot understand, a great deal that seems to me inexplicable; but all I can say is, that I have tried its directions, and find that in my case they do work,that it is a book that I can live by; and that is enough for me.
"And now, Mary, I am coming home again, quite another man from what I went out,with a whole new world of thought and feeling in my heart, and a new purpose, by which, please God, I mean to shape my life. All this, under God, I owe to you; and if you will let me devote my whole life to you, it will be a small return for what you have done for me.
"You know I left you wholly free. Others must have seen your loveliness, and felt your worth; and you may have learnt to love some better man than me. But I know not what hope tells me that this will not be; and I shall find true what the Bible says of love, that 'many waters cannot quench it, nor floods drown.' In any case, I shall be always, from my very heart, yours, and yours only.
"J
AMES
M
ARVYN
."
Mary rose, after reading this letter, rapt into a divine state of exaltation,the pure joy, in contemplating an infinite good to another, in which the question of self was utterly forgotten.
He was, then, what she had always hoped and prayed he would be, and she pressed the thought triumphantly to her heart. He was that true and victorious man, that Christian able to subdue life, and to show, in a perfect and healthy manly nature, a reflection of the image of the superhuman excellence. Her prayers that night were aspirations and praises, and she felt how possible it might be so to appropri-

 

Page 842
ate the good and the joy and the nobleness of others as to have in them an eternal and satisfying treasure. And with this came the dearer thought, that she, in her weakness and solitude, had been permitted to put her hand to the beginning of a work so noble. The consciousness of good done to an immortal spirit is wealth that neither life nor death can take away.
And so, having prayed, she lay down to that sleep which God giveth to his beloved.

 

Page 843
XXXVII.
The Question of Duty
It is a hard condition of our existence here, that every exaltation must have its depression. God will not let us have heaven here below, but only such glimpses and faint showings as parents sometimes give to children, when they show them beforehand the jewelry and pictures and stores of rare and curious treasures which they hold for the possession of their riper years. So it very often happens that the man who has gone to bed an angel, feeling as if all sin were forever vanquished, and he himself immutably grounded in love, may wake the next morning with a sick-headache and, if he be not careful, may scold about his breakfast like a miserable sinner.
We will not say that our dear little Mary rose in this condition next morning,for, although she had the headache, she had one of those natures in which, somehow or other, the combative element seems to be left out, so that no one ever knew her to speak a fretful word. But still, as we have observed, she had the headache and the depression,and there came the slow, creeping sense of waking up, through all her heart and soul, of a thousand, thousand things that could be said only to one person, and that person one that it would be temptation and danger to say them to.
She came out of her room to her morning work with a face resolved and calm, but expressive of languor, with slight signs of some inward struggle.
Madame de Frontignac, who had already heard the intelligence, threw two or three of her bright glances upon her at breakfast, and at once divined how the matter stood. She was of a nature so delicately sensitive to the most refined shades of honor, that she apprehended at once that there must be a conflict,though, judging by her own impulsive nature, she made no doubt that all would at once go down before the mighty force of re-awakened love.
After breakfast she would insist upon following Mary

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