The long advancing hour draws nigh--the hour When life's young pulse begins its mystic play, And deep affection's dreams of Form or Joy Shall be unveiled, a bodily presence To thy yearning heart and fond maternal eye, The primal Soul, a semblance of thine own, Its high abode shall leave and dwell in day, Thyself its forming Parent. A miracle, indeed, Shall nature work. Thou shalt become The bearing mother of an Infant Soul-- Its guardian spirit to its home above. But yet erewhile the lagging moments come That layeth the living, conscious, burden down, Firm faith may rest in hope. Accordant toils Shall leave no time for fear, nor doubt, nor gloom. Love, peace, and virtue, are all born of Pain, And He who rules o'er these is ever good. The joyous promise is to her who trusts, Who trusting, gains the vital boon she asks, And meekly asking, learns to trust aright. Louisa, the second child, born on her father's birthday, was the most intellectual and the most resourceful of the Alcott children, reflecting in her own buoyant personality the happy conditions existing before and at the time of her birth, when her father had attained his greatest material prosperity and was also realizing his mental ambitions in his little school, and her mother was temporarily relieved from the cares that so often weighed heavily upon her. Shortly before the birth of Elizabeth the father makes this entry in his journal: THE ADVENT COMETH Daily am I in expectation of beholding with the eye of sense, the spirit that now lingers on the threshold of this terrestrial life, and only awaits the bidding of the Reaper within, to usher itself into the presence of mortals. It standeth at the door and waiteth for admission to the exterior scene of things.... Let the time come. Two little ones in advance await its coming; and greetings of joy shall herald its approach. The birth of Elizabeth is followed by this entry in his journal: At sunset this day a daughter was born to us. One of the most trying of the Alcott family's experiences came after the birth of Elizabeth, when Bronson Alcott, again in Boston, aroused a storm of protest with his radical teachings and his advanced interpretations of the Bible. Shocked that the city where he expected to find sympathy and encouragement should have repudiated him, his school disrupted and abject poverty his lot, broken mentally and physically, he met with another cruel disappointment in the death of his infant son. Yet even then there was no word of bitterness, and no mention is made in his journal of the father's grief. Indirectly it is expressed in a subsequent entry announcing the birth of the fourth daughter, Abba May.