A Handful of Stars: Texts That Have Moved Great Minds

e's masterpiece forms also the pivot of Sir Walter Scott's weird story. Mary Avenel comes to the climax of her sorrows. She seems to have lost everything and everybody. H

hold the Volume in sacred veneration. On opening it, she found that, among the leaves, there were texts neatly inscribed in her mother's handwriting. In Mary's present state of mind, these passages, reaching her at a time so critical and in a manner so touching, strangely affected her. She read on one of these slips the consoling exhortation: 'Call upon Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.' 'There are those,' Sir Walter says, 'to whom a sense of religion has come in storm and tempest; there are those whom it has summoned amid scenes of re

was as dramatic as in the case of Robinson Crusoe. I t

bly deeper. She had newly learned to pray, and it seemed to her that her prayers had been instantly answered. She felt that the compassion of heaven, which she had learned to implore in the very words of Scripture--"

de that, written by Daniel Defoe in 1719. In the mouth