Page:Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since.djvu/272

 it increased every day, and every night I thanked my Creator with exuberant gratitude, for the fullness of my joy. Yet my heart too much exulted, too exclusively trusted to the earth, and at the moment when I thought my sky the brightest, it was involved in a cloud of woe. Edward's only surviving parent was a father, a proud, and mercenary man. Two sons were his sole offspring, and the idea that one should marry a cottager was insupportable. With the threat of disinheritance, he commanded him to relinquish the design; and I, educated with high ideas of filial obedience, entreated him to submit, though my heart felt that it must break at his desertion. Nothing, however, was able to destroy the inviolable affection of that exalted being. To me, a novice in the school of sorrow, this trial appeared too much for endurance, until it was appointed to be swallowed up in a greater affliction. My mother, whose health had been delicate from her youth, and who had long been subject to symptoms of disease, which she laboured to conceal from me, now rapidly declined. I watched in agony, day and night, the struggles of a gentle spirit, disengaging itself from clay. Her resignation to the divine will was scarcely shaded by maternal anxiety; for she trusted to leave her orphan to the protection of one, who loved the orphan's God. Sometimes she would join our hands, as we kneeled together by her couch, saying with a smile, "My children, you will be happy, though I am gone. Yet forget not to seek greater happiness; for ah! if you come not to me,