If, then, once in childhood you suffered an affliction that was ineffable,--if once, when powerless to face such an enemy, you were summoned to fight with the tiger that couches within the separations of the grave,--in that case, after the example of Judaea, [17] sitting under her palm tree to weep, but sitting with her head veiled, do you also veil your head. Many years are passed away since then; and perhaps you were a little ignorant thing at that time, hardly above six years old. But your heart was deeper than the Danube; and, as was your love, so was your grief. Many years are gone since that darkness settled on your head; many summers, many winters; yet still its shadows wheel round upon you at intervals, like these April showers upon this glory of bridal June. Therefore now, on this dove-like morning of Pentecost, do you veil your head like Judaea in memory of that transcendent woe, and in testimony that, indeed, it surpassed all utterance of words. Immediately you see that the apparition of the Brocken veils _his_ head, after the model of Judaea weeping under her palm tree, as if he also had a human heart; and as if _he_ also, in childhood, having suffered an affliction which was ineffable, wished by these mute symbols to breathe a sigh towards heaven in memory of that transcendent woe, and by way of record, though many a year after, that it was indeed unutterable by words. FOOTNOTES [1] As occasions arise in these Sketches, when, merely for the purposes of intelligibility, it becomes requisite to call into notice such personal distinctions in my family as otherwise might be unimportant, I here record the entire list of my brothers and sisters, according to their order of succession; and Miltonically I include myself; having surely as much logical right to count myself in the series of my own brothers as Milton could have to pronounce Adam the goodliest of his own sons. First and last, we counted as eight children, viz., four brothers and four sisters, though never counting more than six living at once, viz., 1. _William_, older than myself by more than five years; 2. _Elizabeth_; 3. _Jane_, who died in her fourth year; 4. _Mary_; 5. myself, certainly not the goodliest man of men since born my brothers; 6. _Richard_, known to us all by the household name of _Pink_, who in his after years tilted up and down what might then be called his Britannic majesty's oceans (viz., the Atlantic and Pacific) in the quality of midshipman, until Waterloo in one day put an extinguisher on that whole generation of midshipmen, by extinguishing all further call for their services; 7. a second _Jane_; 8. _Henry_, a posthumous child, who belonged to Brazennose College, Oxford, and died about his twenty-sixth year. [2] Cicero, in a well-known passage of his "Ethics", speaks of trade as irredeemably base, if petty, but as not so absolutely felonious if wholesale.