or in Arctic
latitudes, where the changes of the year, and the external signs
corresponding to them, express themselves by no features like those in
which the same seasons are invested under our temperate climes: so that,
if knowing, we cannot at least feel the identity of their revolutions.
We were married, I have said, on the birthday--the seventeenth
birthday--of Agnes; and pretty nearly on her eighteenth it was that she
placed me at the summit of my happiness, whilst for herself she thus
completed the circle of her relations to this life's duties, by
presenting me with a son. Of this child, knowing how wearisome to
strangers is the fond exultation of parents, I shall simply say, that he
inherited his mother's beauty; the same touching loveliness and
innocence of expression, the same chiselled nose--mouth--and chin, the
same exquisite auburn hair. In many other features, not of person
merely, but also of mind and manners, as they gradually began to open
before me, this child deepened my love to him by recalling the image of
his mother; and what other image was there that I so much wished to keep
before me, whether waking or asleep? At the time to which I am now
coming but too rapidly, this child, still our only one, and unusually
premature, was within four months of completing his third year;
consequently Agnes was at that time in her twenty-first year; and I may
here add, with respect to myself, that I was in my twenty-sixth.

But before I come to that period of wo, let me say one word on the
temper of mind which so fluent and serene a current of prosperity may be
thought to have generated. Too common a course I know it is, when the
stream of life flows with absolute tranquillity, and ruffled by no
menace of a breeze--the azure overhead never dimmed by a passing cloud,
that in such circumstances the blood stagnates: life, from excess and
plethora of sweets, becomes insipid: the spirit of action droops: and it
is oftentimes found at such seasons that slight annoyances and
molestations, or even misfortunes in a lower key, are not wholly
undesirable, as means of stimulating the lazy energies, and disturbing a
slumber which is, or soon will be, morbid in its character. I have known
myself cases not a few, where, by the very nicest gradations, and by
steps too silent and insensible for daily notice, the utmost harmony and
reciprocal love had shaded down into fretfulness and petulance, purely
from too easy a life, and bec