We attempt no concealment of our wish to exhibit fully this rare and beautiful feature of a Christian's faith and love,--less rare, we would fain believe, in the reality of its existence, than in the courage that avows it. We value it, not only for its own sake, in a connection where it is needed and may be the source of peculiar happiness, but also for the evidence it affords of the power and glory of our religion. We find a letter written on the first anniversary, after Henry Ware's death, of _her_ decease who had been the object of his earliest attachment, and whom every later change, in life and death, endeared the more. The letter was written to a child of that departed mother.
"I always feel, when I get your letters, as if I wanted to sit down and write to you at once, so much have I in my mind that I wish to communicate to you, and so much do I enjoy free communication with you. You may thank your stars that I do not give way to my inclination, for you would have more prosing than you would care to read. I am tempted now to depart from my usual custom of writing only once a fortnight, because I feel so much the want of some one with whom to commune upon the subject which cannot but occupy my mind upon this day. It is the first time for seventeen years that I have not had a delightful conversation with your dear father upon the event of which it is the anniversary. I loved to hear him tell me of your mother, for it helped to strengthen the feeling which I have loved to cherish, the sense of responsibility to her in my connection with her children. And her character was so fine a one, and her early experiences so much like my own, that I always felt that I gained wisdom as well as pleasure in contemplating it....
"I have often wished I could convey to your mind, without the intervention of words, what I felt to be the tenderness of the relation in which I stood to you; for my views and feelings have always been so different from what I find to be general, that it was not to be expected that you should understand them without such communication. From the very commencement of my connection with your father, I have realized the truth of my long-cherished theory, that the strength of one affection does not interfere in the least with the strength of another; we love not one brother or sister or child the less _because_ we have another to love; if there is any difference in the degree, it arises from other causes than number; and I know not why it should not be the same in all relations, where the soul is large enough to take so wide a range. I would thank God for this special blessing in addition, I might almost say above all others, for without it all others would have had a bitter ingredient. It has been one of the purest sources of happiness, that we could dwell together upon the memory of her who had gone, and feel an equal anxiety and interest in fulfilling her wishes towards _her_ and _our_ children.