"
"This comes to me as an entirely new idea," said Mrs. Markland, in a
thoughtful way. "Yet how beautiful! It seems to bring my feet to the
verge of a new world, and my hand trembles with an impulse to
stretch itself forth and lift the vail."
"Do not repress the impulse," said Mrs. Willet, laying a hand gently
upon one of Mrs. Markland's.
"Ah! But I grope in the dark."
"We see but dimly here, for we live in the outward world, and only
faint yet truthful images of the inner world are revealed to us. No
effort of the mind is so difficult as that of lifting itself above
the natural and the visible into the spiritual and
invisible--invisible, I mean, to the bodily eyes. So bound down by
mere sensual things are all our ideas, that it is impossible, when
the effort is first made, to see any thing clear in spiritual light.
Yet soon, if the effort be made, will the straining vision have
faint glimpses of a world whose rare beauties have never been seen
by natural eyes. There is the natural, and there is the spiritual;
but they are so distinct from each other, that the one by
sublimation, increase, or decrease, never becomes the other.
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