age--where there was present
neither sickness, nor calamity, nor guilt, but the very opposites of all
these! Could it then be true, that the only sanctuary of peace is in
the heart? that while love is the master passion of humanity, the
main-spring of human action, the crowning interest of human life--while
it is ordained, natural, inevitable, it should issue as if it were
discountenanced by Providence, unnatural, and to be repelled? Could it
be so? Was Hester's warning against love, against marriage, reasonable,
and to be regarded? That warning Margaret thought she could never put
aside, so heavily had it sunk upon her heart, crushing--she knew not
what there. If it was not a reasonable warning, whither should she turn
for consolation for Hester? If this misery arose out of an incapacity
in Hester herself for happiness in domestic life, then farewell sisterly
comfort--farewell all the bright visions she had ever indulged on behalf
of the one who had always been her nearest and dearest? Instead of
these, there must be struggle and grief, far deeper than in the anxious
years that were gone; struggle with an evil which must grow if it does
not diminish, and grief for an added sufferer--for one who deserved
blessing where he was destined to receive torture. This was not the
first time by a hundred that Hester had kept Margaret from her pillow,
and then driven rest from it; but never had the trial been so great as
now. There had been anxiety formerly; now there was something like
despair, after an interval of hope and comparative ease.

Mankind are ignorant enough, Heaven knows, both in the mass, about
general interests, and individually, about the things which belong to
their peace: but of all mortals, none perhaps are so awfully
self-deluded as the unamiable. They do not, any more than others, sin
for the sake of sinning; but the amount of woe caused by their selfish
unconsciousness is such as may well make their weakness an equivalent
for other men's gravest crimes. There is a great diversity of
hiding-places for their consciences--many mansions in the dim prison of
discontent: but it may be doubted whether, in the hour when all shall be
uncovered to the eternal day, there will be revealed a lower deep than
the hell which they have made. They, perhaps, are the only order of
evil ones who suffer hell without seeing and knowing that it is hell.
But they are under a heavier curse even than this; they inflict
tor