BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
93 
pathies would be moved to hear of these heartbursts, — the 
scanty and bare existence, the nominal wages and rewards 
of toil, the longing in some hearts for a wider life, the glimpse 
that some few had that all was not well in the world, the wait¬ 
ing of others for a helping hand and leadership where alone 
they would be powerless to go, the refuge of others in thoughts 
of a reunion through their faith with loved ones now afar, who 
have succumbed, alas! after years of anguish. The hope and 
aspiration of these souls, starving for sympathy, are engraved 
in words on stones and tablets of their dead,—to those dead, 
asleep under the guardianship of fir-covered slopes and distant 
snows, whose step will no longer resound within the walls of the 
green-spired church, around whose base their graves cluster. 
I carried away with me the sense of a great oppression, an 
oppression the outcome and realization of what the causes 
of this burden to my senses might mean. The horror of these 
sharp social contrasts in life, whether brought to us by 
painter or observation, is as great as other horrors — in¬ 
deed greater — because the source of the misery besetting 
our path. The errors of all systems fostering and harboring 
such motives of light and joy cannot be dismissed with a 
careless thought. 
If I have brought these impressions for you to weigh, it 
is with the knowledge that human suffering is not peculiar 
to Europe, nor to any quarter of the globe; also I know by 
earnest effort a light will arise to dispel from humanity these 
shadows. 
A passage from a letter written in October of the following 
year deepens the impression of the serious and increasingly 
religious trend of her mind. She says: — 
“I have returned, if I may say 1 return,’ although I do not 
imply a retrogression, if the word carries with it that idea, to 
a state of mind I at one time approached; but, with the ac¬ 
cumulated wealth of experience and knowledge, this state is 
not comparable with the old. The present condition is one 
divested of all externality or desire to give expression by ex¬ 
ternal forms, where before Church rites and rules were the 
