But I lift my eyes from Camilla's unpliant drapery to the red red rose in her hair, and thence, naturally, to her silent face, and in that instant ugly dress and red red rose fade out of my sight. What is it that I see, with tearful tenderness and a nameless pain at the heart? A young face deepened and drawn with suffering; dark, large eyes, whose natural laughing light has been quenched in tears, yet shining still with a distant gleam caught from the eternal fires. O still, pathetic face! A sterner form than Time has passed and left his vestige there. Happy little girl, playing among the flickering shadows of the Rhine-land, who could not foresee the darker shadows that should settle and never lift nor flicker from her heavy heart? Large, lambent eyes, that might have been sweet, but now are only steadfast,--that may yet be sweet, when they look tonight into a baby's cradle, but gazing now upon a waiting audience, are only steadfast. Ah! so it is. Life has such hard conditions, that every dear and precious gift, every rare virtue, every pleasant facility, every genial endowment, love, hope, joy, wit, sprightliness, benevolence, must sometimes be cast into the crucible to distil the one elixir, patience. Large, lambent eyes, in which days and nights of tears are petrified, steadfast eyes that are neither mournful nor hopeful nor anxious, but with such unvoiced sadness in their depths that the hot tears well up in my heart, what do you see in the waiting audience? Not censure, nor pity, nor forgiveness for you do not need them,--but surely a warm human sympathy, since heart can speak to heart, though the thin, fixed lips have sealed their secret well. Sad mother, whose rose of life was crushed before it had budded, tender young lips that had drunk the cup of sorrow to the dregs, while their cup of bliss should hardly yet be brimmed for life's sweet springtime, your crumbling fanes and broken arches and prostrate columns lie not among the ruins of Time. Be comforted of that. They witness of a more pitiless Destroyer, and by this token I know there shall dawn a brighter day. The God of the fatherless and the widow, of the worse than widowed and fatherless, the Avenger of the Slaughter of the Innocents, be with you, and shield and shelter and bless!