"Are you mad?" I cry, "she is not dead! She is no more dead than you are! Only a moment ago, she was speaking to me! Do dead people speak?"
But rave and cry as I may, she is dead. In smiling and sweetly speaking, even while yet I said "She is here!" yea, in that very moment she went.
Our Barbara is asleep!—to awake—when?—where?—we know not, only we altogether hope, that, when next she opens her blue eyes, it will be in the sunshine of God's august smile—God, through life and in death, her friend.
CHAPTER L.
"Then, breaking into tears, 'Dear God,' she cried, 'and must we see,
All blissful things depart from us, or e'er we go to Thee;
We cannot guess Thee in the wood, or hear Thee in the wind:
Our cedars must fall round us e'er we see the light behind.
Ay, sooth, we feel too strong in weal to need Thee on that road;
But, woe being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on God.'"
I am twenty years old now, barely twenty; and seventy is the appointed boundary of man's date, often exceeded by ten, by fifteen years. During all these fifty—perhaps sixty—years, I shall have to do without Barbara. I have not yet arrived at the pain of this thought: that will come, quick enough, I suppose, by-and-by!—it is the astonishment of it that is making my mind reel and stagger!
I suppose there are few that have not endured and overlived the frightful novelty of this idea.
I am sitting in a stupid silence; my stiff eyes—dry now, but dim and sunk with hours of frantic weeping—fixed on vacancy, while I try to think exactly of her face, with a greedy, jealous fear lest, in the long apathy of the endless years ahead of me, one soft line, one lovely line, may become faint and hazy to me.