“And he has no more trouble, my child,” the priest concluded. “He is the happiest man I ever saw!”
Is any face that I have seen-- Some perfect type of girlhood’s face: Some nun’s, soul-radiant, full of grace-- Like thine, my beautiful, my Queen?
Of all the eyes have paused on mine-- And these have met some wondrous eyes; So large and deep, so chaste and wise-- Have any faintly imaged thine?
The chisel with the brush has vied, Till each seems victor in its turn: And love is ever quick to learn, Nor throws the proffered page aside:
Yet few the glimpses it has caught, For thou transcendest all that art Can show thee--even to the heart Most skilled to read the poet’s thought.
That thought can pierce its native sky Beyond the artist’s starry guess: But all that it may dare express, Is through the worship of a sigh.
And this thou art, a sigh of love-- Love that created as it sighed; And shaped thee forth a peerless bride Dowered for the spousals of the Dove.
To set the music of thy face To earthly measure, were to give Th’ informing soul, and make it _live_ As there--God’s uttermost of grace.
M. de Lamartine tells us in his _Confidences_ that, as the sages pause for reflection between life and death, so his mother was in the habit of devoting an interval at the close of the day in looking back on its vanished hours, and seizing its impressions before night should have dispersed them for ever.
When all the household had retired to rest, and no sound was to be heard but the breathing of her children in their little beds around her, or the howling of the wind against the casement and the bark of the dog in the court, she would softly open the door of a little closet of books, and seat herself before an inlaid cabinet of rose-wood to record the events of the day, pour out her anxieties and sorrows, her joy and gratitude, or utter a prayer all warm from her heart. Her son says: “She never wrote for the sake of writing, still less to be admired, though she wrote much for her own satisfaction, that she might have, in this register of her conscience and the domestic occurrences of her life, a moral mirror in which she could often look and compare herself with what she had been in other days, and thus constantly amend her life. This custom of recording what was passing in her soul--a habit she retained to the end--produced fifteen or twenty little volumes of intimate communings with herself and God, which I have the happiness to preserve, and where I find her once more, living and full of affection, when I feel the need of taking refuge in her bosom.”