These things he told me, and they were all true; but he told me also better things, not so hard for me to know. He gave me the history of his moral struggles and victories. He told me of the "comfort" my letters had been to him; his whole heart was opened to me in the faith that I would understand and believe him. It was then that he told me he was trying to live by some verses he had learned; and in answer to my request, hesitatingly, and with breath shortened still more by embarrassment, he repeated the lines:
"I stand upon the Mount of God,
With gladness in my soul,
I hear the storms in vale beneath—
I hear the thunder roll.
"But I am calm with Thee, my God,
Beneath these glorious skies,
And to the height on which I stand
No storm nor cloud can rise."
He was wholly unconscious that there was anything unusual in his reaching up from the depths of sin, misery, and degradation to the spiritual heights of eternal light. He rather reproached himself for having left the valley of repentance, seeming to feel that he had escaped mental suffering that was deserved; although he admitted: "The night after you left me in October, when I went back to my cell, the tears were just running down my face—if that could be called repentance."