168
changing circumstances, an unfailing refuge. If the waves of life's troubled ocean be sometimes tempest-tossed, there yet rise around us, in the wide waste, isles of sunny richness and sweet repose,—
"Where silverly the echoes run,—
Thy will be done! Thy will be done!"
If the shadows of earthly sorrow may sometimes deepen into midnight gloom, to the Christian there ever ariseth light in darkness, for he sees already dawning above the horizon the bright and morning star which shall guide him to the regions of cloudless and everlasting day.
Religion can alone fill the heart here with a peace which, as the world cannot give, so neither can it take away, and prepare its possessor for that future state where there is a fulness of joy,—for that divine inheritance where there are pleasures for evermore.
Such, then, are the prospects of life when religion is there; and such, therefore, are the rightful contrasts to the opposite pictures of life as destitute of Christian principle.
Would that L. E. L.'s own gifted hand had also embodied some of these contrasts! Alas! the silver cord of her life has been too early loosed,—the golden bowl of her rich imaginings is broken at the fountain,—the daughter of music is brought low, and the sweet voice of her soul's eloquence is hushed in death!
With far different feelings must we close this part of our essay to those which dictated the parting good wishes of the former. At that time the genius of L. E. L. was shedding its full light on the literary world, and years of happiness seemed before her. A few short months, and suddenly, as the departing
