Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/96

82 separation from the universal life, a seclusion, a division, a cleft, a wound? For these women, such a severance was in part healed, made whole, closed up, and cured. Life was restored between two at a time of human-kind. Did these three women guess that their sufferings of sympathy with their children were indeed the signs of a new and universal health—the prophecy of human unity?

The sign might have been a more manifest and a happier prophecy had this union of tenderness taken the gay occasion as often as the sad. Except at times, in the single case of Mme. de Sévigné, all three—far more sensitive than the rest of the world—were yet not sensitive enough to feel equally the less sharp communication of joy. They claimed, owned, and felt sensibly the pangs and not the pleasures of the absent. Or if not only the pangs, at least they were apprehensive chiefly in that sense which human anxiety and foreboding have lent to the word; they were apprehensive of what they feared. "Are you warm?" writes Marceline Valmore to her child. "You have so little to wear—are you really warm? Oh, take care of me—cover me well." Elsewhere she says, "You are an insolent child to think