Page:Dream Life - Mitchell - 1899? Altemus.djvu/25

 leave their traces in such tears as will make you kinder and better for days and weeks. Or you shall assist at some neighbor funeral, where the little dead one—(like one you have seen before)—shall hold in its tiny grasp—(as you have taught little dead hands to do)—fresh flowers, laughing flowers, lying lightly on the white robe of the dear child —all pale—cold—silent

I had touched my Aunt Tabithy: she had dropped a stitch in her knitting. I believe she was weeping.

—Aye, this brain of ours is a master worker, whose appliances we do not one-half know; and this heart of ours is a rare storehouse, furnishing the brain with new material every hour of our lives; and their limits we shall not know, until they shall end—together.

Nor is there, as many faint-hearts imagine, but one phase of earnestness in our life of feeling. One train of deep emotion cannot fill up the heart: it radiates like a star, God-ward and earth-ward. It spends and reflects all ways. Its force is to be reckoned not so much by token, as by capacity. Facts are the poorest and most slumberous evidences of passion, or of affection. True feeling is ranging everywhere; whereas your actual attachments are too apt to be tied to sense.