LONGINGS FOR SUMMER REST. 139 tering shield between the hills. On its farther side green mountains arise till they hold the white clouds on their heads. Below, Jay Peak stands over four thousand feet above the sea, while above, Owl's Head soars over three thousand, covered with forest to its summit. It is a picture fit for . Paradise. Yet it is but one glimpse amid many of the inexpressible beauty of this lake and mountain country of the North. She, sitting here, looked out upon this consummate scene; looked with her tender, steadfast eyes across these emerald meadows, to the lake shining upon her through the opening hills, to the mountains smiling down on her from the distant heaven, their keen amethyst notching the deep, deep blue of a cloudless sky. The splendor of this northern world fell upon her like a new, divine revelation. The tonic in its atmosphere touched her feeble pulses; the peace brooding in its stillness penetrated her aching brain with the promise of a new life. Without, the world was full of tranquillity; within, it was full of affection and the words of loving kindness. Then she wondered (and her wonder was sad with a hopeless regret) why summer after summer she had lingered in her city home, till the crash and roar of the streets, coming through her open windows, had filled body and brain with torture. "How blind I was!" she exclaimed. I could not take the time from my work; has neither time nor work left for me. "I said that and now life How much more, how much better I could have worked, had I rested. If I am spared, how differently I will do. I will come here every summer, and live.” Alas! before another summer, the winter snow had wrapped her forever from the earthly sight of this unutterable beauty. Hers from the beginning was the fatal mistake of so many brain-workers that all time given to refreshment and rest is so much taken from the results of labor; forgetting, or not realizing, that the finer the instrument, the more fatal the effects of undue strain, the more imperative the necessity of avoiding overwear and the perpetual jar of discordant conditions; forgetting, also, that the rarest flowering of the brain has its root in silence and beauty and rest. Here in this window, whither she, wasted and suffering, had been borne by gentle arms, our dear friend wrote her "Invalid's Plea," one of the most touching of her many touching lyrics :— "O Summer! my beautiful, beautiful Summer, ness Begot in the depths of an utter despair? The little green grasshopper, weak as we deem her, With all things to take and with nothing to give - DEATH AND BURIAL. 141 CHAPTER VIII. ALICE'S DEATH AND BURIAL. WHEN a dear one, dying willingly, lets go of life, the loosened hands by so much reconcile us to their going. It was not so with Alice. Through physical suffering almost beyond precedent, through days and nights and years of hopeless illness, she yet clung to this life. Not through any lack of faith in the other and higher ; but because it seemed to her that she had not yet exhausted the possibilities, the fullness, and sweetness of this. She thought that there was a fruition in life, in its labor, its love, which she had never realized; and even in dying she longed for it. The autumn before her death, in a poem entitled, 'The Flight of the Birds," she uttered this prayer: "Therefore I pray, and can but pray, Lord, keep and bring them back when May Thick 'broidered with leaves of wheat, "Yea, bring them back across the seas And, if thy holy will it be, Keep me alive, once more to see The glad and glorious day." 66 could It could not be. "The golden witnesses only chant their spring music above her couch of final rest. Yet within one month of death, she was busier than ever with plans of happiness for others. "O ! if God only could let me live ten years longer," she said; "it seems as if I wouldn't ask for any more time. I would live such a different life. I would never shut myself up in myself again. Then I would do something for my friends!" Phoebe, writing of her last days, says: 'Though loving and prizing whatever is good and lovely here, and keeping firm and tender hold of the things that are seen, yet she always reached one hand to grasp the unseen and eternal. She believed that God is not far from any one of us, and that the sweet communion of friends who are only separated by the shadowy curtain of death, might still remain unbroken. "During her last year of illness she delighted much in the visits of her friends; entered with keenest zest into their hopes and plans, and liked to hear of all that was going on in the world from which she was now shut. She talked much of a better country with those who came to talk to her upon the land to which her steps drew near; and so catholic and free from prejudice was her spirit, that many of those friends whom she loved best, and with whom she held the most sacred communion, differed widely from herself in their religious faith. "She loved to listen to the reading of poetry and of HER LAST POEM. 143 pleasant stories, but not latterly to anything of an exciting or painful nature; and often wanted to hear the most tender and comforting chapters of the Gospels, especially those which tell of the Saviour's love for women. At the beginning of each month she had been accustomed for some time to furnishing a poem to one of our city papers. On the first of that month of which she never saw the ending, she was unable to write or even to dictate. A whole week had gone by, when, speaking suddenly one day with something of the old energy, she asked to be placed in her chair, and to have her portfolio, saying, "That article must be ready to-day." She was helped from the bed as she desired, and, though unable to sit up without being carefully supported, she completed the task to which she had set herself. The last stanza she wrote reads thus: "As the poor panting hart to the water-brook runs, As the water-brook runs to the sea, So earth's fainting daughters and famishing sons, "The writing is trembling and uncertain, and the pen literally fell from her hand; for the long shadows of eternity were stealing over her, and she was very near the place where it is too dark for mortal eyes to see, and where there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge." She had written earlier what she herself called "A Dying Hymn," and it was a consolation to her to repeat it to herself in her moments of deepest agony. Earth, with its dark and dreadful ills, Recedes, and fades away; |