exhaustless. No, she is not poor, so highly gifted by Nature with dower richer than Eastern princess; without her I am poor, but in her presence earth and air are clothed with radiant beauty. I have found my ideal wife at last, and in the loveliest of frames. "I know not how she is connected, and care not to trace her history. I believe, in spite of dark whispers often repeated in my ears, that naught but pure and good ever claimed alliance with such as she. Without caring to investigate her earliest history, I am willing to stand by her side and share her destiny, without knowing the fate or history of any who may claim relationship to her. "She is lovely, and gifted enough to move with honor and grace in any earthly circle. No position can elevate her. She will elevate every duty she performs, every position she fills; and she is fitted to shine hereafter among the spirits of the just made perfect in heaven. "It shall be the aim of my life to make her happy. The trials through which she so early passed have given a sublimity and a sacredness to her character which makes me well nigh worship her. She is at an infinite remove from those gay butterfly creatures which haunt watering places and parties. "I could not enshrine upon the altar of my heart an im age so decked. "The life we live is too brief to spend it with one who has no lofty principle, no truer aim or object in living, than to show and shine, dazzle and attract. Like a flower in a shaded, lone valley she was lovely and beautiful when alone, neglected and unsought-the only woman I have known in society whose aim was not sometimes, or all the time, effect." "If," said Selwyn, " she is the picture hung up in your heart's studio so long ago, I long to see the lovely counterpart." "I have not," said Carleyn, "wedded my heart to a hand, a foot, or an eye, but she seems all soul. I know not by what avenue she found the subterranean passage to my heart -before I knew it, I was surrounded by an influence I could not, would not resist. I have boasted of my insensi bility, but the touch of that little hand thrills my soul, and makes a child, a happy child of me." " Yes," said he, walking the floor, "I thought once, indeed Miss Elliott herself gave me the impression that Nepenthe was engaged to the wealthy Mr. Nicholson, and then I found out how much I really loved her, and how essential she was to my happiness; then I found out I could not live without her. Yes," said he, walking back and forth, she will make me wiser, happier, better." 66 "How did you find out that Miss Stuart was not engaged to Mr. Nicholson ?" said Mr. Selwyn, with some curiosity in his manner. "Miss Elliott told me positively that she was," said Carleyn. "Of course I believed it; and to strengthen my belief in her engagement, some one, (I have no idea who) actually caused an opened love-letter, pretended to be written from Mr. Nicholson to Nepenthe to come accidentally in my way. "I thought it strange, but supposed the letter a veritable document and authentic, as the writing was certainly like Miss Nepenthe's. But one day I heard Mr. Nicholson muttering angrily to himself something like this-that he should never be such a fool as to break his heart for one little woman if she didn't want him-he was sure there were as many good fish, &c. Then Mr. Vole told me afterwards, that Nicholson had been refused by somebody, he couldn't find out who, and he was really a little sore about it. He was still surprised that any sensible woman could refuse his great fortune and his well-dressed self. To him it was unaccountable. He at first thought the refusal only an evidence of diffidence, and renewed his offers; but he had to believe at last that even a portionless girl did not want him for her husband." "Then you mean to marry her, and give up all the fine chances. There's Florence Elliott, a beauty and an heiress if rumor speak correctly-you have already a favorable place in her heart." "Florence Elliott is beautiful, radiantly beautiful, but I never feel like clasping her to my heart, or confiding in her. I think of her as a wonderful fine painting, with its great sweep of hand and dash,' but not as a being I long to protect-not as a woman with a gentle, loving heart. I cannot agree with Pope "If to her share some penal errors fall, Look to her face, and you'll forget them all." Grace is in her step, but not heaven in her eye.' 66 It would be a good thing for you to marry a rich wife," said Selwyn. "In my ideas of marriage," said Mr. Carleyn, "policy has never entered. I am glad I can support a wife. It is a pleasant thought that I can have one being dependent upon me alone for care, protection, and support. "In entering the holy estate of matrimony no such sordid considerations should be thought of. There are many marriages in the world without love. I am romantic enough to marry for love, and I am vain enough to think she will marry me for myself what I really am." "How is it, Carleyn," said Selwyn, "that you never act at all conceited-never elated with the distinction you have gained as an artist, a distinction very flattering to a young man ?" My mother taught me," said Carleyn, "a long time ago, a maxim she had learned from an old book—' Do all the good you can in the world, and make as little noise about it as possible;' and then I have in my own mind an ideal so much higher than any standard to which I have attained, that I have no feeling of vanity-no inclination to boast: and my heart is so far from reaching its standard of right, its standard of moral worth. I know and feel every day that it is a very good thing to be great, but it is a far greater thing to be good." Carleyn writes in his journal that night this sentence"Dim the blaze of science, hush the voice of song, veil the face of sculptured beauty, hide the loveliest embodiment of the artist's ideal, remove all the rarest, choicest, and costliest productions of genius, and the bereaved world would not be half so desolate as if deprived of goodness, lives pure and conscientious, principles of moral worth, deeds of every day piety-those silent invisible influences perfect and perennial, preserving pure and clear the turbulent fountains of life." CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE HEART AT MIDSUMMER-FROM THE LIFE. Our great High Priest above, alone, In twain the mystic curtain rends. WHAT a wonderful thing expression is! It makes some plain faces beautiful, some beautiful features ugly. Sometimes a worn and weary pallid face, lit by its strange glory, will wear a saintly, a martyr-like, an angelic glow. "I don't like his expression," we say, as we meet some repellent face, with perhaps an Apollo cut of features, and gather up our spiritual garments, and hurry by, as if to escape some moral contagion, or flee some deadly malaria. Have you ever had company, reader, when you couldn't make anybody talk, or sing, or dance, or play; till you start up at last, suddenly and desperately determined to get up something to entertain them, for there they all sit, with their clean collars and silk dresses, and don't stir or say a word. You try Copenhagen, and Proverbs, and Stage Coach, and at last, to get them thoroughly wide awake, you set them performing the very graceful original and astonishing evolutions of" Queen Dido is dead." After deciding conclusively by manual, cerebral and pedal logic how she did die, the collars and silk dresses begin to assume their stiff silence again, and some one, not you, for you are afraid to break the rich repose of your new mahogany and marble-some one starts blind man's buff. Chairs fly, bijouterie rattles, tables tremble, and you think you hear a faint sound of creaking rosewood. You at length cunningly maneuvre them into the more sensible and suggestive game of "What is my Thought like?" which brings out in mirthful flashes the profound erudition and metaphysical acumen of the gay circle around you, who can boast, many of them, of sixteen years of girlhood's thoughts. When the girls are all gone, as you put the chairs up in their old places, all but one poor unfortunate, whose broken back you hide away in the extension, to await its morning's dose of Spalding's marvellous rheumatic glue, you extinguish the lights, and sit and think and wonder. What is thought like? Thought, Feeling, Expression! They make up life's world-they give us calm sleep, peaceful dreams, or frightful nightmare, and an aching pillow. They can make sweet bitter, and turn twilight's serene rest into midnight's turbulent tempest. If I could only have caught and copied the expression on Carleyn's face, as he sat reading in his mother's Bible, this first verse that met his eye as he opened the book. It was marked by her pale hand with a pencil, only a few days before she died: "Withhold not good from any to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it." It was the text of that self-denial sermon he heard when a boy. It brought back a tide of golden memories. Go where he would, the words still whispered to him their clear, yet imperative echoes. As he read them slowly aloud, there came a look into his face, such as man's face seldom wears. It was a blending of will and purpose, regret, resignation, nobility, faith and enthusiasm in one single soul-ray-for expression is only a soul-ray. The face is like a window shutter in the dark, through which thought's prismatic colors gleam. Sometimes you almost see a faint violet purpling the east of the soul-though these mysterious soul-rays have their genuine heat and noble expansion, but no vision or color, yet visions colored with wondrous beauty-those beatific soul-beams-wake in us, as they gleam out from loving human faces. I thought as I watched the stars last night, coming out one after another at evening's reception, our souls are like constellations instarred with thoughts, moving around the great Father-Soul, wearing their incadescent noonday glow as they turn towards, or eclipsed in midnight's shadow as they turn away from the full-orbed Central-—or wandering out of their predestined path far from the sphere of true attractionfalling like once radiant aeriolites, heavy and cold and dark to the earth. It is a beautiful proof of the immortality of the soul, that no imagery like that of stars and suns and skies and clouds |