Let it not be supposed that Helen's life was all shadow. Oh, no! In proportion as she shuddered at darkness, and trembled before the spectres her own imagination created, she rejoiced in sunshine, and revelled in the bright glories of creation. She was all darkness or all light. There was no twilight about her. Never had a child a more exquisite perception of the beautiful, and as at night she delineated to herself the most awful and appalling images that imagination can conceive, by day she beheld forms more lovely than ever visited the poet's dream. She could see angels cradled on the glowing bosom of the sunset clouds, angels braiding the rainbow of the sky. Light to her was peopled with angels, as darkness with phantoms. The brilliant-winged butterflies were the angels of the flowers--the gales that fanned her cheeks the invisible angels of the trees. If Helen had lived in a world all of sunshine, she would have been the happiest being in the world. Moonlight, too, she loved--it seemed like a dream of the sun. But it was only in the presence of others she loved it. She feared to be alone in it--it was so still and holy, and then it made such deep shadows where it did not shine! Yes! Helen would have been happy in a world of sunshine--but we are born for the shadow as well as the sunbeam, and they who cannot walk unfearing through the gloom, as well as the brightness, are ill-fitted for the pilgrimage of life. Childhood is naturally prone to superstition and fear. The intensity of suffering it endures from these sources is beyond description. We remember, when a child, with what chillness of awe we used to listen to the wind sighing through the long branches of the elm trees, as they trailed against the window panes, for nursery legends had associated the sound with the moaning of ghosts, and the flapping of invisible wings. We remember having strange, indescribable dreams, when the mystery of our young existence seemed to press down upon us with the weight of iron, and fill us with nameless horror. When a something seemed swelling and expanding and rolling in our souls, like an immense, fiery globe _within us_, and yet we were carried around with it, and we felt it must forever be rolling and enlarging, and we must forever be rolling along with it. We remember having this dream night after night, and when we awakened, the first thought was _eternity_, and we thought if we went on dreaming, we should find out what eternity meant. We were afraid to tell the dream, from a vague fear that it was wrong, that it might be thought we were trying to pierce into the mystery of God, and it was wicked in a child thus to do. Helen used to say, whenever she fell asleep in the day-time under a green tree, or on the shady bank of a stream, as she often did, that she had the brightest, most beautiful dreams--and she wished it was the _fashion_ for people to sleep by day instead of night.