And now, how shall I fill up this sketch? Let us pause for a moment, and suppose the fate of Meta and Klopstock reversed, and that _she_ had been called, according to her own tender and unselfish wish, to be the survivor. Under such a terrible dispensation, her angelic meekness and sublime faith would at first have supported her; she would have rejoiced in the _certainty_ of her husband's blessedness, and in the yearning of her heart she would have tried to fancy him ever present with her in spirit; she would have collected together his works, and have occupied herself in transmitting his glory as a poet, without a blemish, to the admiration of posterity; she would have gone about all her feminine duties with a quiet patience--for it would have been _his_ will; and would have smiled--and her smile would have been like the moonlight on a winter lake: and with all her thoughts loosened from the earth, to her there would never more have been good or evil, or grief, or fear, or joy: space and time would only have existed to her, as they separated her from _him_. Thus she would have lived on dyingly from day to day, and then have perished, less through regret, than through the intense longing to realize the vision of her heart, and rejoin him, without whom all concerns of life were vain, and less than nothing. And this, I am well convinced,--as far as one human being may dare to reason on the probable result of certain feelings and impulses in another,--would have been the lot of Meta, if left on the earth alone, and desolate.