Despair was rapidly tending to ratify itself.
Hope, in any degree, would be a cordial for sustaining her efforts. But
to flounder along a dreadful chaos of snow-drifts, or snow-chasms,
towards a point of rock, which, being turned, should expose only
another interminable succession of the same character--might
_that_ be endured by ebbing spirits, by stiffening limbs, by the
ghastly darkness that was now beginning to gather upon the inner eye?
And, if once despair became triumphant, all the little arrear of
physical strength would collapse at once.
Oh! verdure of human fields, cottages of men and women, (that now
suddenly seemed all brothers and sisters,) cottages with children
around them at play, that are so far below--oh! summer and spring,
flowers and blossoms, to which, as to _his_ symbols, God has given
the gorgeous privilege of rehearsing for ever upon earth his most
mysterious perfection--Life, and the resurrections of Life--is it
indeed true, that poor Kate must never see you more? Mutteringly she
put that question to herself. But strange are the caprices of ebb and
flow in the deep fountains of human sensibilities. At this very moment,
when the utter incapacitation of despair was gathering fast at Kate's
heart, a sudden lightening shot far into her spirit, a reflux almost
supernatural, from the earliest effects of her prayer.
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