Sunlight Is Painting.

We Are But Shadows: We Are, Not Endowed With Real Life, And All That Seems Most Real About Us Is But The Thinnest Substance Of A Dream,--till The Heart Be Touched. That Touch Creates Us--then We Begin To Be--thereby We Are Beings Of Reality And Inheritors Of Eternity.

The Present Is Burthened Too Much With The Past.

Halfway Down A By-street Of One Of Our New England Towns Stands A Rusty Wooden House, With Seven Acutely Peaked Gables, Facing Towards Various Points Of The Compass, And A Huge, Clustered Chimney In The Midst. The Street Is Pyncheon Street; The House Is The Old Pyncheon House; And An Elm-tree, Of Wide Circumference, Rooted Before The Door, Is Familiar To Every Town-born Child By The Title Of The Pyncheon Elm.

Some Attribute Had Departed From Her, The Permanence Of Which Had Been Essential To Keep Her A Woman. Such Is Frequently The Fate, And Such The Stern Development, Of The Feminine Character And Person, When The Woman Has Encountered, And Lived Through, An Experience Of Peculiar Severity. If She Be All Tenderness, She Will Die. If She Survive, The Tenderness Will Either Be Crushed Out Of Her, Or—and The Outward Semblance Is The Same—crushed So Deeply Into Her Heart That It Can Never Show Itself More.

Death Was Too Definite An Object To Be Wished For Or Avoided.