Note 5 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
When first I saw the following lines, I called Mattie to hear me read them to her. I thought of her "CHILDREN," the girls she had taught. We were seated in her private parlor; and her attention was fixed from the first stanza: "Shedding sunshine of love on my face." The reading ended, she threw herself on the bed and wept aloud. Her feelings, when fully aroused, were paroxysms of joy or grief; and now the two alternated as memory of her first school at Lancaster, and of the girls on the other side of the earth, at Melbourne, mingled with all her life of love for "THE CHILDREN." She made notes when she read Milton, Spencer, Mrs. Browning, Longfellow, Tennison, but this little poem was literally bathed in her tears.
O. A. C.