Et qui encor, par un plus chaste væu, En se bruslant, veult Hercule estre veu, Mais qui se mue en eau, air, terre, et feu, Comme uu second Protee. L'un meurt de froid, et l'autre meurt de chauld; L'un est chetif, l'autre a ce qui luy fault; L'un sur l'esprit se fonde, L'autre s'arreste à la beauté du corps; But, on the other hand, if love, simple love, is the worst of poets, that same simple love is beyond comparison the best of letter writers. In love poems conceits are distilled from the head; in love letters feelings flow from the heart; and feelings are never so feelingly uttered, affection never so affectionately expressed, truth never so truly spoken, as in such a correspondence. Oh, if the disposition which exists at such times were sustained through life, marriage would then be indeed the perfect union, the "excellent mystery" which our Father requires from those who enter into it, that it should be made; and which it might always be, under his blessing, were it not for the misconduct of one or the other party, or of both. If such a disposition were maintained, -"if the love of husbands and wives were grounded (as it then would be) in virtue and religion, it would make their lives a kind of heaven on earth; it would prevent all those contentions and brawlings which are the great plagues of families, and the lesser hell in passage to the greater." Let no reader think the worse of that sentence because it is taken from that good homely old book, the better for being homely, entitled the Whole Duty of Man. I once met with a book in which a servant girl had written on a blank leaf, "not much love after marriage, but a good deal before!" In her station of life this is but too true; and in high stations also, and in all those intermediate grades where either the follies of the world, or its cares, exercise over us an unwholesome influence. But it is not so with well constituted minds in those favourable circumstances wherein the JOACHIM DU BELLAY. heart is neither corrupted by wealth, nor hardened by neediness. So far as the tendency of modern usages is to diminish the number of persons who are thus circumstanced, in that same proportion must the sum of happiness be diminished, and of those virtues which are the only safeguard of a nation. And that modern policy and modern manners have this tendency, must be apparent to every one who observes the course both of public and private life. This girl had picked up a sad maxim from the experience of others; I hope it did not as a consequence make her bestow too much love before marriage herself, and meet with too little after it. I have said much of worthless verses upon this subject; take now, readers, some that may truly be called worthy of it. They are by the Manchester poet, Charles Swain. i. Love? I will tell thee what it is to love! Above, the stars in shroudless beauty shine; 2. Yes, this is Love, the stedfast and the true, To breathe, in some green walk, their first young vow, While summer flowers with moonlight dews were wet, And winds sigh'd soft around the mountain's brow, And all was rapture then which is but memory now! The dream of life indeed can last with none of us, As if the thing beloved were all a Saint, And every place she entered were a shrine: † but it must be our own fault, when it has passed away, if the realities disappoint us: they are not "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable," unless we ourselves render them so. The preservation of the species is not the sole end for which love was implanted in the human heart; that end the Almighty might as easily have effected by other means: not so the development of our † GONDIBERT. moral nature, which is its higher purpose. stone in the adjacent churchyard told where The comic poet asserts that Verum illud verbum est vulgo quod dici solet. Omnes sibi esse melius malle, quam alteri :* the remains of Margaret Bacon had been deposited in the 30th year of her age. When the stupor and the agony of that but this is not true in love. The lover never bereavement had passed away, the very in says Heus proximus sum egomet mihi ; tensity of Leonard's affection became a source of consolation Margaret had been He knows and understands the falsehood of to him a purely ideal object during the LEONARD was not more than eight-andtwenty when he obtained a living, a few miles from Doncaster. He took his bride with him to the vicarage. The house was as humble as the benefice, which was worth less than £50 a-year; but it was soon made the neatest cottage in the country round, and upon a happier dwelling the sun never shone. A few acres of good glebe were attached to it; and the garden was large enough to afford healthful and pleasurable employment to its owners. The course of true love never ran more smoothly; but its course was short. O how this spring of love resembleth And by and by a cloud takes all away! † Little more than five years from the time of their marriage had elapsed, before a head years of his youth; death had again rendered her such. Imagination had beautified and idolised her then; faith sanctified and glorified her now. She had been to him on earth all that he had fancied, all that he had hoped, all that he had desired. She would again be so in heaven. And this second union nothing could impede, nothing could interrupt, nothing could dissolve. He had only to keep himself worthy of it by cherishing her memory, hallowing his heart to it while he performed a parent's duty to their child; and so doing to await his own summons, which must one day come, which every day was brought nearer, and which any day might bring. 'Tis the only discipline we are born for; All studies else are but as circular lines, And death the centre where they must all meet. ‡ The same feeling which from his childhood had refined Leonard's heart, keeping it pure and undefiled, had also corroborated the natural strength of his character, and made him firm of purpose. It was a saying of Bishop Andrewes that "good husbandry is good divinity;" "the truth whereof," says Fuller, "no wise man will deny." Frugality he had always practised as a needful virtue, and found that in an especial manner it brings with it its own reward. He now resolved upon scrupulously setting apart a fourth of his small income to make a provision for his child, in case of her surviving him, as in the natural course of things might be expected. If she should be removed before him, for this was an event the possibility of which he always bore in mind, he had resolved that whatever should have been accumulated with this intent, should be disposed of to some other pious purpose, + MASSINGER. N The child had been christened Deborah after her maternal grandmother, for whom Leonard ever gratefully retained a most affectionate and reverential remembrance. She was a healthy, happy creature in body and in mind; at first — one of those little prating girls Of whom fond parents tell such tedious stories ;* afterwards, as she grew up, a favourite with the village school-mistress, and with the whole parish; docile, good-natured, lively and yet considerate, always gay as a lark and busy as a bee. One of the pensive pleasures in which Leonard indulged was to gaze on her unperceived, and trace the likeness to her mother. Oh Christ! How that which was the life's life of our being, That resemblance which was strong in childhood lessened as the child grew up; for Margaret's countenance had acquired a cast of meek melancholy during those years in which the bread of bitterness had been her portion; and when hope came to her, it was that "hope deferred" which takes from the cheek its bloom, even when the heart, instead of being made sick, is sustained by it. But no unhappy circumstances depressed the constitutional buoyancy of her daughter's spirits. Deborah brought into the world the happiest of all nature's endowments, an easy temper and a light heart. Resemblant therefore as the features were, the dissimilitude of expression was more apparent; and when Leonard contrasted in thought the sunshine of hilarity that lit up his daughter's face, with the sort of moonlight loveliness THE name of Leonard must now be dropped as we proceed. Some of the South-American tribes, among whom the Jesuits laboured with such exemplary zeal, and who take their personal appellations, (as most names were originally derived,) from beasts, birds, plants, and other visible objects, abolish upon the death of every individual the name by which he was called, and invent another for the thing from which it was taken, so that their language, owing to this curiously inconvenient custom, is in a state of continual change. An abolition almost as complete with regard to the person had taken place in the present instance. The name, Leonard, was consecrated to him by all his dearest and fondest recollections. He had been known by it on his mother's knees, and in the humble cottage of that aunt who had been to him a second mother; and by the wife of his bosom, his first, last, and only love. Margaret had never spoken to him, never thought of him, by any other name. From the hour of her death, no human voice ever addressed him by it again. He never heard himself so called, except in dreams. It existed only in the dead letter; he signed it mechanically in the course of business, but it had ceased to be a living name. we Men willingly prefix a handle to their names, and tack on to them any two or more honorary letters of the alphabet as a tail; they drop their surnames for a dignity, and change them for an estate or a title. They are pleased to be Doctor'd and Professor'd; to be Captain'd, Major'd, Colonel'd, General'd, or Admiral'd;—to be Sir John'd, | my-Lorded, or your-Graced. "You and I," says Cranmer in his Answer to Gardiner's book upon Transubstantiation -"you and I were delivered from our surnames when were consecrated Bishops; sithence which time we have so commonly been used of all men to be called Bishops, you of Winchester, and I of Canterbury, that the most part of the people know not that your name is Gardiner, and mine Cranmer. And I pray God, that we being called to the name of Lords, have not forgotten our own baser estates, that once we were simple squires!"But the emotion with which the most successful suitor of Fortune hears himself first addressed by a new and honourable title, conferred upon him for his public deserts, touches his heart less, (if that heart be sound at the core,) than when, after long absence, some one who is privileged so to use it, accosts him by his christian name, that household name which he has never heard but from his nearest relations, and his old familiar friends. By this it is that we are known to all around us in childhood; it is used only by our parents and our nearest kin when that stage is passed; and as they drop off, it dies as to its oral uses with them. It is because we are remembered more naturally in our family and paternal circles by our baptismal than our hereditary names, and remember ourselves more naturally by them, that the Roman Catholic, renouncing, upon a principle of perverted piety, all natural ties when he enters a convent and voluntarily dies to the world, assumes a new one. This is one manifestation of that intense selfishness which the law of monastic life inculcates, and affects to sanctify. Alas, there need no motives of erroneous religion to wean us from the ties of blood and of affection! They are weakened and dissolved by fatal circumstances and the ways of the world, too frequently and too soon. 66 "Our men of rank," said my friend one day when he was speaking upon this subject, are not the only persons who go by different appellations in different parts of their lives. We all moult our names in the natural course of life. I was Dan in my father's house, and should still be so with my uncle William and Mr. Guy, if they were still living. Upon my removal to Doncaster, my master and mistress called me Daniel, and my acquaintance Dove. In Holland I was Mynheer Duif. Now I am the Doctor, and not among my patients only; friends, acquaintance, and strangers, address me by this appellation; even my wife calls me by no other name; and I shall never be any thing but the Doctor again,till I am registered at my burial by the same names as at my christening." O even in spite of death, yet still my choice, I think I see thee, and I hear thy voice! In the once popular romance of Astrea the question si Amour peut mourir par la mort de la chose aimée ? is debated in reference to the faithful shepherd, Tyrcis, who, having lost his mistress Cleon, (Cleon serving for a name feminine in French, as Stella has done in English,) and continuing constant to her memory, is persecuted by the pertinacious advances of Laonice. The sage shepherd, Sylvandre, before whom the point is argued, and to whom it is referred for judgment, delivers, to the great disappointment of the lady, the following sentence: Qu'une Amour perissable n'est pas vray Amour; car il doit suivre le sujet qui luy à donné naissance. C'est pourquoy ceux qui ont aimé le corps seulement, doivent enclorre toutes les amours utters in a plaintive tone, he is not come yet! I will return to-morrow!'" du corps dans le mesme tombeau ou il s'enserre: to alight from the coach; and every day she mais ceux qui outre cela ont aimé l'esprit, doivent avec leur Amour voler apres cet esprit aimé jusques au plus haut ciel, sans que les distances les puissent separer. There is a more remarkable case in which love, after it had long been apparently extinct, produced a like effect upon being accidentally revived. It is recorded in a Glasgow newspaper. An old man residing in the neighbourhood of that city found a miniature of his wife, taken in her youth. She had been dead many years, and he was a person of strictly sedate and religious habits; but the sight of this picture overcame him. From the time of its discovery till his death, which took place some months afterwards, he neglected all his ordinary duties and employments, and became in a manner imbecile, spending whole days without uttering a word, or manifesting the slightest interest in passing occurrences. The only one with whom he would hold any communication was a little grandchild, who strikingly resembled the portrait; to her he was perfectly docile; and a day or two before his death he gave her his purse, and strictly enjoined her to lay the picture beside him in his coffin, -a request which was accordfulfilled. The character of a constant mourner is sometimes introduced in romances of the earlier and nobler class; but it is rare in those works of fiction, and indeed it is not common in what has happily been called the romance of real life. Let me, however, restrict this assertion within its proper bounds. What is meant to be here asserted (and it is pertinent to this part of our story) is, that it is not common for any one who has been left a widow or widower, early in life, to remain so always out of pure affection to the memory of the dead, unmingled with any other consideration or cause. Such constancy can be found only where there is the union of a strong imagination and a strong heart, which, perhaps, is a rare union; and if to these a strong mind be united, the effect would probably be different. It is only in a strong imagination that the deceased object of affection can retain so firm a hold as never to be dispossessed from it by a living one; and when the imagina-ingly tion is thus possessed, unless the heart be strong, the heart itself, or the intellect, is likely to give way. A deep sense of religion would avert the latter alternative; but I will not say that it is any preservative against the former. A most affecting instance of this kind is related by Dr. Uwins in his Treatise on Disorders of the Brain. A lady on the point of marriage, whose intended husband usually travelled by the stage-coach to visit her, went one day to meet him, and found instead of him an old friend, who came to announce to her the tidings of his sudden death. She uttered a scream, and piteously exclaimed "he is dead!" But then all consciousness of the affliction that had befallen her ceased. "From that fatal moment," says the Author, "has this unfortunate female daily for fifty years, in all seasons, traversed the distance of a few miles to the spot where she expected her future husband Mr. Newton, of Olney, says, that once in the West Indies, upon not receiving letters from his wife in England, he concluded that surely she was dead, and this apprehension affected him so much, that he was nearly sinking under it. "I felt," says he, "some severe symptoms of that mixture of pride and madness which is commonly called a broken heart; and indeed, I wonder that this case is not more common than it appears to be. How often do the potsherds of the earth presume to contend with their Maker! and what a wonder of mercy is it that they are not all broken!" This is a stern opinion; and he who delivered it held stern tenets, though in his own disposition compassionate and tender. He was one who could project his feelings, and relieve himself in the effort. No husband ever loved his wife more passionately, nor with a more imaginative affection; the long and wasting disease by which she was |