Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/39

Rh of suffering have come not only some of the most beautiful examples of cheerful resignation, but of active mental effort. Lessons have been taught so sweet, unselfish, and holy, that they have strengthened the healthy and braced the strong in their contest with the inevitable cares and trials of life.

It was while the poet. Miss Elizabeth Barrett (afterwards Mrs. Browning), was an invalid, carried from bed to sofa for eight years, that she wrote some of the most spiritual of her poems and sonnets. The experiences in the seclusion of her sick room aided the development of her mind and the strengthening of her religious principles. Not books merely, though she was a great scholar, but solitude, suffering, and self-communion matured that fine mind and sublimated that sweet spirit, until she might be said in her sick chamber to have dwelt with God.

A yet more memorable instance of a long life of suffering consecrated to the highest uses, was shown in the case of the sweetest of our modern hymn-writers, Miss Charlotte Elliott. Her life is a true poem in its harmony of thought and action, of example and precept. No startling incidents, no elaborate details, are presented in the very brief (too brief) memoir which a surviving sister gave of her life prefixed to a recent edition of her poems; but the account is all the more instructive, because God led His faithful servant along the quiet, shadowed path, unseen by the world—a path soon