The face is an angel face; no matter for curious lines of beauty; no matter for popular talk of prettiness; no matter for its angles, or its proportions; no matter for its color or its form—the soul is there, illuminating every feature, burnishing every point, hallowing every surface. It tells of honesty, sincerity and worth; it tells of truth and virtue—and you clasp the image to your heart as the received ideal of your fondest dreams. The figure may be this or that, it may be tall or short, it matters nothing—the heart is there. The talk may be soft or low, serious or piquant—a free and honest soul is warming and softening it all. As you speak, it speaks back again; as you think, it thinks again (not in conjunction, but in the same sign of the Zodiac); as you love, it loves in return. —It is the heart for a sister, and happy is the man who can claim such! The warmth that lies in it is not only generous, but religious, genial, devotional, tender, self-sacrificing, and looking heavenward. A man without some sort of religion is, at best, a poor reprobate, the football of destiny, with no tie linking him to infinity, and the wondrous eternity that is begun with him; but a woman without it is even worse—a flame without heat, a rainbow without color, a flower without perfume! A man may, in some sort, tie his frail hopes and honors with weak, shifting ground-tackle to business, or to the world; but a woman without that anchor which they call faith is adrift and a-wreck! A man may clumsily contrive a kind of moral responsibility out of his relations to mankind, but a woman in her comparatively isolated sphere, where affection and not purpose is the controlling motive, can find no basis for any system of right action, but that of spiritual faith. A man may craze his thought and his brain, to trustfulness in such poor harborage as fame and reputation may stretch before him; but a woman—where can she put her hope in storms, if not in Heaven? And that sweet trustfulness—that abiding love—that enduring hope, mellowing every page and scene of life, lighting them with pleasantest radiance, when the world-storms break like an army with smoking cannon—what can bestow it all, but a holy soul-tie to what is above the storms, and to what is stronger than an army with cannon? Who that has enjoyed the counsel and the love of a Christian mother, but will echo the thought with energy, and hallow it with a tear?—_et moi, je pleurs!_ My fire is now a mass of red-hot coal. The whole atmosphere of my room is warm. The heat that with its glow can light up, and warm a garret with loose casements and shattered roof, is capable of the best love—domestic love. I draw farther off, and the images upon the screen change. The warmth, the hour, the quiet, create a home feeling; and that feeling, quick as lightning, has stolen from the world of fancy (a Promethean theft), a home object, about which my musings go on to drape themselves in luxurious reverie.