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248   CYNTHIA TAGGART.

Many a low and mystic word, 
From the realm of shadows sent, 
In the busy throng unheard,
Makes the silence eloquent.

Words of sweetest promise spoken 
Only where the dirge is sung,
Where the "golden bowl" is broken,
And the "silver chord" unstrung.

Faith shall, like an evening star, 
Faintly tremble through the gloom, 
Hope and memory shall sit 
Like Angels by the tomb.


CYNTHIA TAGGART.

THE history of this sorely afflicted and deeply interesting person excites in us the most solemn sympathy, admiration and wonder. It has been narrated with touching and beautiful simplicity by the Rev. James C. Richmond, in a little book called "The Rhode-Island Cottage, or A Gift for the Children of Sorrow;" and from this, we have obtained all our information concerning her. She is a native of Rhode-Island. Her father, William Taggart, was a revolutionary solider, and took a very active part in the defense of his county. The property of his family was entirely destroyed while the British troops were on the Island, but after the war he purchased a farm about six miles from Newport, built a cottage on the side of a hill near the sea-shore, and lived in quiet seclusion until his death. He was an intelligent and pious man, and cheerfully bore the heavy domestic afflictions which were allotted him.  Cynthia's education was but trifling; for even in childhood she was subject to debility and pain; and could attend school only in the summer-time, from her sixth to her 


CYNTHIA TAGGART.   249

ninth year. In the autobiography alluded to, she says: "My favorite amusements were invariably found, when health permitted, in viewing and admiring the varied and soul-filling works of the great Creator; in listening to the music of the winds and waves with an ineffable and indefinable delight; in reading books that were instructive and interesting; in pursuing without interruption a pleasing train of thought; and in the elysian scenes of fancy. My employments were chiefly of a domestic kind, and my inclinations and habits of those activity and industry. I had never the most remote and vague apprehension that my mental capacities, even if cultivated, were competent for productive efforts; with few exceptions, it was not till several years after the commencement of excruciating illness, that my thoughts and feelings were committed to paper in the form of poetry." When she was about nineteen years old, a complication of chronic diseases began to afflict her; and from that time until now, a period of twenty-six years, she has been confined to a bed of agony, without one gleaming hope of ever being relieved from her intense suffering, until the angel of Death sets her free. Her case has baffled all medical skill' sleep has been withheld to an almost unparalleled degree, never appearing, unless forced by the most powerful anodynes. But although in such a hopeless state, although she never loses the sense of pain, she yet sometimes forgets her misery, and finds relief and even consolation in the gift of God within her soul,--the power of expressing thought, feeling, and imagination, in words that glow with true poetic fire. During the restless hours of midnight nearly all her fervent and pathetic strains have been composed, and were written down afterwards, but her father or her friends, at their leisure. She has, however, a more refreshing source of relief than genius. Religion is her comforter and never-failing support, strengthening her to be calm and patient, and clearing her vision to see by the faith the land that is afar off--"where the inhabitant shall no more say, I am sick."

Her father and mother are dead: but she still lives in The Rhode-Island Cottage, nursed by a widowed sister, and companioned by another sister, who, a kindred sufferer in resignation and intelligent piety, has been many years a helpless invalid. Her poems, which were first edited in 1834, are about to be re-published in New York. The editor of the Providence Literary Journal says, "They are the emanations of a mind rich in endowment, embodied in a style of language, the correctness and purity of which, under all these adverse circumstances, is scarcely less remarkable than the thoughts which it contains."

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