The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 60, October, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 60, October, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
In the early spring she grew weaker day by day, and died on the 13th of
March, at Brixton, in England, at the age of thirty-two.
Those who loved either her person or her works will find her place
forever empty.
Among her manuscript papers I found this sketch, which has a peculiar
significance now that the writer has passed away. It has never been
printed.
A NICHE IN THE HEART.
I had been wandering, almost all day, in the cathedral of a town at some
distance from London. I had sketched its carved pulpit, one or two
cherub faces looking down from its columns, some of its best reliefs,
and its oldest monument. It was evening, and I could no longer see to
draw, though pencillings of light still fell on the pavement through the
larger windows, whose colors were softened like those of the lunar
rainbow; and still the edges of the stalls were gilded with the last
gleams of sunset, though the seats were filled already with those
phantoms which twilight seems to create in such a place. The monuments
looked calmer and less formal than when daylight bared all their defects
of design or finish; they seemed now worthy of their position beneath
the vaulted roof, and even, adjuncts themselves to the harmony of the
architecture. One among them, noticeable in the daytime for its refined
workmanship, now gleamed out fresher and whiter than the rest, as was
natural, for it had been placed there but a little while; but it had
besides more _expression_, in its very simplicity, than such-like
mementos of stone or marble usually contain. This was the memento of a
husband's regret, and, as such, touching, however vain: a delicate form
drooping on a bier, at whose head stood an angel, with an infant in his
arms, which he raised to heaven with an air of triumph; while at the
foot of the death-bed a figure knelt, in all the relaxed abandonment of
woe. Marvellously, and out of small means, the chisel had conveyed this
impression; for the kneeling figure was mantled from head to foot, and
had its face hidden in the folds of the drapery which skirted the
bier,--veiled, like the face of the tortured father in the old tragic
tale.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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