GLIMPSES OF A SOUL.

———

BY FRANCES S. OSGOOD.

———

Kate Carol to Mary H——.

“I miss you, Mary mine, more than I can tell, with this cold pen and sluggish ink. I own I love Right Angledom. After the bustle and randomness of life in New York—its straight ways, its quiet and its monotony, are refreshing. I love the Quakers too, with their delicious repose of manner—their low, lulling, musical voices, and their simple truthfulness of character and conversation. Their ‘ways are ways of pleasantness, and all their paths are peace.’ But I must confess to, now and then, a feeling, I cannot say of home-sickness—for I, wanderer that I am, have no home, unless it be in your heart, and in some few others, a precious few, indeed—but a feeling of regret, a pining for the past; for the few true and pure spirits to whom I have dared reveal myself, who know me thoroughly, faults and all, and who love me the more for those faults; because love and pity come together on their divine mission from the gate of heaven, and walk hand-in-hand, twin children of God, ever tender, and beautiful, and sad, through this clouded vale of tears.

“ ‘Thee knows,’ Mary, as a lovely Quaker maiden said to me in a low lute-tone the other night, ‘Thee knows the gravel and the gold run together in all characters.’ Sweet Lizzie L——, thee does not know how much that simple Orphic saying consoled me. Well, there is some gold in my character, but it requires the sunbeams of love and sympathy to light it up, and so reveal it; and they might change even the gravel to gold in a heart so docile as mine, if they only knew it, and would only take the trouble.

“Thee knows, Mary dear, my invincible aversion to strangers. Gay, careless, confiding, frank, indeed to a fault, among those who seem to love me, I am shy, cold, dull—nay, worse, I am wretched, where I am not sure of pleasing. This is a most unfortunate weakness of mine, and has been the cause of many troubles to me. I recollect once in New York going to a party, which I afterwards heard was made for me—made expressly to introduce me to some distinguished authors—and just see, Mary, how badly I behaved; see what a wayward, naughty lion I was. Had I only known then, as I afterward did, the kind interest that my host took in me, I should have been so happy, so social, so delightful; but as it was, with my usual want of self-confidence, finding myself among strangers, I felt my heart, like the pimpernel on the approach of rain, coldly shrinking and shutting up, leaf by leaf, until I became a statue of lead; and on my introduction to those writers, whom I had all my life been eager to see, and whom, if I had only been sure that they would let me, I could have loved at once. I replied in monosyllables, so coldly, so drily, that they left me, surprised and repelled; and my dear, kind, disappointed host, afterward said, in reply to some encomiums by a friend—‘Yes, I suppose she is all that, but you must allow that she is very eccentric.’ Am I eccentric, Mary? Am I any thing but foolish and timid, and sensitive to a ridiculous degree?

“Now it was this shrinking of the heart that I felt, when I first took possession of a large, and at first, somewhat dreary room in a Philadelphia boarding-house. The sister of a dear friend, then in Washington, called upon me, and with a single magical sentence, like a gleam from the lamp of Aladdin, warmed, and furnished, and lighted up the chamber, till it seemed a home even to my lonely and sorrowing heart. She simply said, ‘Oh! this is the room that Sophy had!’ The following impromptu will show you how fervently I felt the change.

THE ROOM THAT SOPHY HAD.

Though strange and chill at first the room,

How soon it seemed with comfort clad,

When some one said—and blessed the gloom⁠—

“It is the chamber Sophy had.”

With that sweet word the sunshine stole,

Around a spirit lone and sad,

A lingering ray from her true soul,

Still warmed “the room that Sophy had.”

And here has beat her happy heart;

And here have rung her accents glad;

And here the darling mused apart,⁠—

Oh, precious “room that Sophy had.”

And here, perhaps, my image stole,

When care unwonted made her sad,

And whispered love through all her soul,

And cheered “the room that Sophy had.”

No palace-hall a queen may pace,

With splendor lit—with beauty clad,

Would seem so filled with light and grace,

As this dear “room that Sophy had.”

“You bid me send you all the verses I write. You little dream of the shower that would overwhelm you, were I to comply literally with your request ‘Nulla die sine linea,’ is my motto as well as that of the painter of old, and while I sew, or walk, or ride, or lounge, I am forever singing to myself impromptu love-songs, from imaginary damsels to imaginary youths, set to music by a score written in the air, and invisible to all eyes but mine, while a band of aerial musicians play the accompaniment, with my heart, for the leader, beating time. You shall have one of them, dear, and that, I think, will content you for the present⁠—

Should all who throng, with gift and song,

And for my favor bend the knee,

Forsake the shrine, they deem divine,

I would not stoop my soul to thee!

The lips, that breathe the burning vow,

By falsehood base unstained must be;

The heart, to which mine own shall bow,

Must worship Honor more than me!

The monarch of a world wert thou,

And I a slave on bended knee,

Though tyrant chains my form might bow,

My soul should never stoop to thee!

Until its hour shall come, my heart

I will possess, serene and free;

Though snared to ruin by thine art,

’Twould sooner break than bend to thee!

“Ah, Mary! if only my dream-opera could play on through life, uninterrupted by the coarser or commoner cares of every-day existence—if the charm of that music, inaudible to others, to which, when I am let alone, my spirit moves, gliding or dancing as the measure chances to be swift or slow, might not be broken by the discord of reality, how light would float the fairy hours, led by that weird and wondrous melody, from ‘night to morn, from morn till dewy eve.’ But often, just in the midst of my heroine’s most impassioned reply to my hero—the bell rings for dinner—or our little Lily-belle wants her robe arranged—or rosy, roguish Mary insists upon playing that she is my mamma and that I am her youngest and naughtiest responsibility; and, after all, the glee that our three loving hearts play and sing together, with now and then a coo from the cradle from our little dove, our precious ‘Picciola,’ as an accompaniment—if less ethereal—less artistic—is quite as sweet and more spirited than the dream-music that Fancy plays in the air for me. To be sure, I have to be punished and put in the corner by my little tyrant, rather oftener than is convenient or agreeable, and to spell hard words, that I eschewed in my vagrant school-days some—forty years ago!—if we count time by ‘heart-throbs,’ as Festus bids us, I have lived longer than that⁠—

“I broke that chain of thought, attracted by the peculiar grace of a compliment paid by a gentleman to a very lovely woman, who is sitting near me, bending a pair of superb Spanish eyes and a graceful Psyche-head over a suspender, on which, beneath her fairy hands a wreath of exquisitely delicate flowers is growing and glowing; all too daintily for the heart it is meant to chain—since that heart is man’s⁠—

For still the fairest, frailest flowers

He soonest casts aside!

But the compliment. Some one remarked, that her head would be perfect, were it not that the organ of reverence was entirely wanting in it. ‘It has never been brought into play,’ was the reply, ‘for she has found no superior on earth.’

“Last night, as I watched her pensive look, I found myself chanting to myself a song to her lost child—the most divinely beautiful being that I ever beheld. I loved her as my own, and the tears still spring to my eyes whenever I think of her. Will you hear the song, Mary?

TO LITTLE ANNIE C——.

Thy dark eyes danced in light,

And on thy cheek the while,

Life’s morning, rosy bright, Annie,

Did softly glow and smile.

A rare and radiant grace,

A beauty not of earth,

Had ‘o’erinformed’ thy face, Annie!

God’s darling! from thy birth.

When last I pressed thy brow,

There dawned thy soul divine;

But Heaven has won thee now, Annie!

A lovelier morn is thine!

While paled life’s early rose,

Thy spirit plumed her wings,

And now—how soft they close, Annie!

While God’s new angel sings!

“Some time before her death, the dear little child had frequently looked up in her mother’s face, and exclaimed, without any apparent or immediate cause—‘Happy Annie!’ and ‘Happy Annie!’ was the only epitaph they traced upon the simple slab of white marble that marked her little grave.

“But I shall sing you to sleep, my own Marie, if I give you any more of my verses: so take a spirit-kiss, and believe me still

“Your fondly attached,

“Kate Carol.”