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My wife and I; or, Harry Henderson's history
My wife and I or Harry Henderson's history Author:Harriet Beecher Stowe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. MY SHADOW-WIFE. MY Shadow-Wife ! Is there then substance in shadow ? Yea, there may be. A shadow—a spiritual presence —may go with us where morta... more »l footsteps cannot go ; walk by our side amid the roar of the city; talk with us amid the sharp clatter of voices ; come to us through closed doors, as we sit alone over our evening fire; counsel, bless, inspire us ; and though the figure cannot be clasped in mortal arms— though the face be veiled—yet this wife of the future may have a power to bless, to guide, to sustain and console. Such was the dream-wife of my youth. Whence did she come ? She rose like a white, pure mist from that little grave. She formed herself like a cloud-maiden from the rain and dew of those first tears. When we look at the apparent recklessness with which great sorrows seem to be distributed among the children of the earth, there is no way to keep our faith in a Fatherly love, except to recognise how invariably the sorrows that spring from love are a means of enlarging and dignifying a human being. Nothing great or good comes without birth-pangs, and in just the proportion that natures grow more noble, their capacities of suffering increase. The bitter, silent, irrepressible anguish of that childish bereavement was to me the awakening of a spiritual nature. The little creature who, had she lived, might have grown up perhaps into a common-place woman, became a fixed star in the heaven-land of the ideal, always drawing me to look upward. My memories of her were a spring of refined and tender feeling, through all my early life. I could not then write ; but I remember that the overflow of my heart towards her memory required expression, and I taught myself a strange kind of manuscript, by copying the letters of the alphabet. I bought six cen...« less