10 UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF THE 



with the Sadducean frigidity of other worshippers. Eegarding all 

 the members of the great human family as his kindred in sorrow 

 and in exile, hia zeal for their welfare partook more of the 

 fervour of domestic affection, than of the kind but gentle 

 warmth of a diffusive philanthropy. Elevated in his own 

 esteem by the consciousness of an intimate union with 

 the Eternal Source of all virtue, the meek missionary of 

 the Cross exhibited no obscure resemblance to the unobtrusive 

 dignity, the unfaltering purpose, and the indestructible com- 

 posure of Him by whom the Cross was borne. The ill-disciplined 

 desires of youth, now confined within one deep channel, flowed 

 quickly onward towards one great consummation ; nor was there 

 any faculty of his soul, or any treasure of his accumulated 

 knowledge, for which aj)propriate exercise was not found on 

 the high enterprise to which he was devoted. 



And yet nature, the great leveller, still asserting her rights 

 even against those whose triumph over her might seem the most 

 perfect, would not seldom extort a burst of passionate grief 

 from the bosom of the holy Henry Martyn, when memory 

 recalled the image of her to whom, in earlier days, the homage 

 of his heart had been rendered. The writer of his life, 

 embarrassed with the task of reconciling such an episode to the 

 gravity befitting a hero so majestic, and a biography so solemn, 

 has concealed this passage of his story beneath a veil, at once 

 transparent enough to excite, and impervious enough to bafi9.e, 

 curiosity. A form may be dimly distinguished of such witchery, 

 as to have subdued at the first interview, if not at the first 

 casual glance, a spirit soaring above all the other attractions of 

 this sublunary sphere. We can faintly trace the pathway, not 

 always solitary, of the pious damsel, as she crossed the bare 

 heaths of Cornwall on some errand of mercy, and listened, not 

 unmoved, to a tremulous voice, pointing to those heights of 

 devotion, from which the speaker had descended, to this lower 

 worship. Then the shifting scene presents the figure — alas ! 

 BO common — of a mother, prudent and inexorable, as if she had 

 been involved in no romance of her own some brief twenty 

 years before ; and then appears the form (deliciously out of 

 place) of the apostolic Charles Simeon, assuming, but in vain, 

 the tender intervenient ofl[ice. In sickness and in sorrow, in 



