AMY AMBER.
Some gentle crisis must have arrived in the history of Hester, for in
these days her heart was more sensitive and more sympathetic than ever
before. The circumvolant troubles of humanity caught upon it as it it
had been a thorn-bush, and hung there. It was not greatly troubled,
neither was its air murky, but its very repose was like a mother's sleep
which is no obstacle between the cries of her children and her
sheltering soul: it was ready to wake at every moan of the human sea
around her. Unlike most women, she had not needed marriage and
motherhood to open the great gate of her heart to her kind: I do not
mean there are not many like her in this. Why the tide of human
affection should have begun to rise so rapidly in her just at this time,
there is no need for conjecturing: much of every history must for the
long present remain inexplicable. No man creates his history any more
than he creates himself; he only modifies it--sometimes awfully; gathers
to him swift help, or makes intervention necessary. But the tide of
which I speak flowed yet more swiftly from the night of the magic
lantern. That experience had been as a mirror in which she saw the
misery of the low of her kind, including, alas! her brother Cornelius.
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