1844-54- REMINISCENCES OF HIS SISTER. 23! 



sanctuary I am cut off. I never hear a prayer. When I 

 look into my heart I see so much sin there ; I give way 

 so often to unchristian passions and gratifications, that I 

 tremble at the thought that God's grace, so little improved, 

 will by and by be taken away. Counsel me ; I have no 

 Mary now, with her gentle, impressive words, and the 

 utterings of lengthened Christian experience, to reprove my 

 sins and follies, and keep me from evil. She was my 

 mother in Christ, and you my father." 



"March 31, 1850. 



"Your letter was to me unspeakably dear, and again 

 reminds me of what I never can or will forget, that you 

 are bound to me by ties such as connect none other of my 

 friends to me. The dark past, which was long to me the 

 very blackness of darkness, has now stars above its horizon, 

 and the shadow, not of the grave, but of the world to comej 

 over it. I begin to think abidingly of Mary, not as one 

 of the dead, but as one of the glorified living, though at no 

 time do I realize it less than at this mournful season of the 

 year, which has witnessed the death of so many of my 

 dearest ones. The last lecture-night at the School of Arts 

 remains as the ineffaceable remembrancer of the latest 

 great sorrow, and inevitably links other griefs of a kindred 

 sort with it : and the whole of April is to me a month of 

 physical fatigue, depressed energy, and painful emotion, 

 which I know better than to cherish, but have not learned 

 the way to cure. ... Of James I think with more mingled 

 feelings than of Mary, but with unabated, nay, with ever- 

 mellowing affection. . . . 



" On all this I will say no more. It would distress others 

 too much to speak thus to them, and might seem to betoken 

 less affection for their devoted love than they deserve or I 



