"Life is the hour that lies between
Earth and the heavenly spheres;
And merges like some tranquil dream
In love's immortal years."
Joy and sorrow, pain and peace, are the inevitable counterparts of nature, as essential to the completeness of life, as the different shades of coloring to a picture. If Mrs. Claremont furnished in herself an isolated illustration of the principle, that happiness, and not suffering, is the normal state of the soul, when health and vigor predominate in the physical, harmony in the intellectual and moral nature, and surrounding influences are favorable to their development, her daughter furnished another evidence, that under the most favorable circumstances for the existence of such a temperament, hereditary descent and early training had failed to do the work, and only by that law which has instituted suffering as the appointed agent for the perfection of the soul, could she reach the spiritual plane on which her mother rested. There was too much clashing of the elements, too much of the restless spirit of enquiry for the meek, sustaining eye of Faith, calmly to steer her course in such a complicated organization as Rosalind's.
It was not thus with Walter who resembled his
