On the morning after she had thus taken Malcolm again into her
service, Florimel had one of these experiences--a foretaste of
the Valley of the Shadow: she awoke in the hour when judgment sits
upon the hearts of men. Or is it not rather the hour for which a
legion of gracious spirits are on the watch--when, fresh raised
from the death of sleep, cleansed a little from the past and its
evils by the gift of God, the heart and brain are most capable of
their influences?--the hour when, besides, there is no refuge of
external things wherein the man may shelter himself from the truths
they would so gladly send conquering into the citadel of his nature,
--no world of the senses to rampart the soul from thought, when
the eye and the ear are as if they were not, and the soul lies naked
before the infinite of reality. This live hour of the morning is
the most real hour of the day, the hour of the motions of a prisoned
and persecuted life, of its effort to break through and breathe. A
good man then finds his refuge in the heart of the Purifying Fire;
the bad man curses the swarms of Beelzebub that settle upon every
sore spot in his conscious being.
But it was not the general sense of unfitness in the conditions
of her life, neither was it dissatisfaction with Lady Bellair, or
the want of the pressure of authority upon her unstable being; it
was not the sense of loneliness and unshelteredness in the sterile
waste of fashionable life, neither was it weariness with the same
and its shows, or all these things together, that could have waked
the youth of Florimel and kept it awake at this hour of the night
--for night that hour is, however near the morning.
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