fellow; and dares make sport of time and infirmity, while, in the person of a thousand-foldly endeared partner, we feel for aged virtue the caressing fondness that belongs to the innocence of childhood, and repeat the same attentions and tender courtesies which had been dictated by the same affection to the same object when attired in feminine loveliness or in manly beauty. Eliz. What a soothing-what an elevating thought! Kath. If it be not only a mere fancy. Fri. At all events, these qualities which I have enumerated, are rarely found united in a single individual. How much more rare must it be, that two such individuals should meet together in this wide world under circumstances that admit of their union as Husband and Wife. A person may he highly estimable on the whole, nay, amiable as neighbour, friend, housemate-in short, in all the concentric circles of attachment save only the last and inmost; and yet from how many causes be estranged from the highest perfection in this! Pride, coldness, or fastidiousness of nature, worldly cares, an anxious or ambitious disposition, a passion for display, a sullen temper,-one or the other-too often proves "the dead fly in the compost of spices," and any one is enough to unfit it for the precious balm of unction. For some mighty good sort of people, too, there is not seldom a sort of solemn saturnine, or, if you will, ursine vanity, that keeps itself alive by sucking the paws of its own self-importance. And as this high sense, or rather sensation of their own value is, for the most part, grounded on negative qualities, so they have no better means of pre serving the same than by negatives-that is, by not doing or saying any thing, that might be put down for fond, silly, or nonsensical;-or (to use their own phrase) by never forgetting themselves, which some of their acquaintance are uncharitable enough to think the most worthless object they could be employed in remembering. Eliz. (in answer to a whisper from Katharine). To a hair! He must have sate for it himself. Save me from such folks! But they are out of the question. Fri. True! but the same effect is produced in thousands by the too general insensibility to a very important truth; this, namely, that the misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year, the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily;—in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum total of the unhappiness of a man's life, are easily counted, and distinctly remembered. The happiness of life, on the contrary, is made up of minute fractions-the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful raillery, and the countless other infinitesimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling. Kath. Well, Sir; you have said quite enough to make me despair of finding a "John Anderson, my Jo, John," with whom to totter down the hill of life. Fri. Not so! Good men are not, I trust, so much scarcer than good women, but that what an other would find in you, you may hope to find in another. But well, however, may that boon be rare, the possession of which would be more than an adequate reward for the rarest virtue. Eliz. Surely he, who has described it so well, must have possessed it? Fri. If he were worthy to have possessed it, and had believingly anticipated and not found it, how bitter the disappointment! (Then, after a pause of a few minutes), ANSWER, ex improviso. Yes, yes! that boon, life's richest treat, Say, 'twas but in his own conceit— The fancy made him glad! Crown of his cup, and garnish of his dish, The boon, prefigured in his earliest wish, The fair fulfilment of his poesy, When his young heart first yearned for sympathy! But e'en the meteor offspring of the brain Unnourished wane; Faith asks her daily bread, And Fancy must be fed. Now so it chanced-from wet or dry, That boon, which but to have possest Doubts tossed him to and fro: Those sparkling colours, once his boast Thin and hueless as a ghost, Poor Fancy on her sick bed lay; Ill at distance, worse when near, Where was it then, the sociable sprite That crown'd the Poet's cup and decked his dish! But that it intercepted Reason's light; O bliss of blissful hours! The boon of Heaven's decreeing, While yet in Eden's bowers Dwelt the first husband and his sinless mate! 332 NEW THOUGHTS ON OLD SUBJECTS. The one sweet plant, which, piteous Heaven agreeing, They bore with them, thro' Eden's closing gate! Of life's gay summer tide the sovran rose ! Late autumn's amaranth, that more fragrant blows If this were ever his, in outward being, Whate'er it was, it is no longer so; Ο THE GARDEN OF BOCCACCIO. F late, in one of those most weary hours, When life seems emptied of all genial powers, A dreary mood, which he who ne'er has known May bless his happy lot, I sate alone; And, from the numbing spell to win relief, |