largely veiled her life. Her spirits were too finely touched for her existence to be altogether a happy one; yet she was far too noble to seem to be unhappy. She turned out a silver lining on the night, though pain and oftentimes gloom shrouded her soul within. "Life," she said to a friend, when she was in England last year, "is one long disappointment." No doubt the words were uttered in a mood of exceptional depression, but on the whole they expressed the speaker's mind. I record them with no hesitation or scruple, for they need not trouble those who knew Isa Blagden. She did not, like some people, insist on her right to be happy, or accuse the Divine Government when the claim was not allowed. As she understood life and its conditions, pain, sorrow, and disappointment necessarily play an important part in it. She relished joy as few can ever have relished it; but when the wings were not permitted to exult, the breast was resigned, and she usually found in ministering to the wounds of others a more than partial forgetfulness of her own. Chateaubriand has observed that sorrow is the strongest pledge of our immortality; and in Isa Blagden's heart the two things were steadily associated. But I know that she wished much to survive, spiritually also, on this side of the dark line; and I cherish the hope that there may lurk something in this little volume which will perpetuate and gratify her yearning.
