CHAPTER XXXII.
PLAIN TALK.
Mary revolved the affairs of her friend in her mind, during the night.
The intensity of the mental crisis through which she had herself just
passed had developed her in many inward respects, so that she looked
upon life no longer as a timid girl, but as a strong, experienced
woman. She had thought, and suffered, and held converse with eternal
realities, until thousands of mere earthly hesitations and timidities,
that often restrain a young and untried nature, had entirely lost their
hold upon her. Besides, Mary had at heart the true Puritan seed of
heroism,--never absent from the souls of true New England women. Her
essentially Hebrew education, trained in daily converse with the words
of prophets and seers, and with the modes of thought of a people
essentially grave and heroic, predisposed her to a kind of exaltation,
which, in times of great trial, might rise to the heights of the
religious--sublime, in which the impulse of self-devotion took a form
essentially commanding. The very intensity of the repression under
which her faculties had developed seemed, as it were, to produce a
surplus of hidden strength, which came out in exigencies. Her reading,
though restricted to a few volumes, had been of the kind that vitalized
and stimulated a poetic nature, and laid up in its chambers vigorous
words and trenchant phrases, for the use of an excited feeling,--so
that eloquence came to her as a native gift.
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