, but one phase of earnestness
in our life of feeling. One train of deep emotion cannot fill up the
heart: it radiates like a star, God-ward and earth-ward. It spends and
reflects all ways. Its force is to be reckoned not so much by token as
by capacity. Facts are the poorest and most slumberous evidences of
passion or of affection. True feeling is ranging everywhere; whereas
your actual attachments are too apt to be tied to sense.

A single affection may indeed be true, earnest, and absorbing; but such
an one, after all, is but a type--and if the object be worthy, a
glorious type--of the great book of feeling: it is only the vapor from
the caldron of the heart, and bears no deeper relation to its
exhaustless sources than the letter, which my pen makes, bears to the
thought that inspires it,--or than a single morning strain of your
orioles and thrushes bears to that wide bird-chorus which is making
every sunrise a worship, and every grove a temple!

My Aunt Tabithy nodded.

Nor is this a mere bachelor fling against constancy. I can believe,
Heaven knows, in an unalterable and unflinching affection, which neither
desires nor admits the prospect of any other. But when one is tasking
his brain to talk for his heart,--when he is not writing positive
history, but only making mention, as it were, of the heart's
capacities,--who shall say that he has reached the fulness, that he has
exhausted the stock of its feeling, or that he has touched its highest
notes? It is true, there is but one heart in a man to be stirred; but
every stir creates a new combination of feeling, that like the turn of a
kaleidoscope will show some fresh color or form.

A bachelor, to be sure, has a marvellous advantage in this; and with the
tenderest influences once anchored in the bay of marriage, there is
little disposition to scud off under each pleasant breeze of feeling.
Nay, I can even imagine--perhaps somewhat captiously--that after
marriage, feeling would become a habit, a rich and holy habit certainly,
but yet a habit, which weakens the omnivorous grasp of the affections,
and schools one to a unity of emotion that doubts and ignores the
promptness and variety of impulse which we bachelors possess.

My aunt nodded again.

Could it be that she approved what I had been saying? I hardly knew.

Poor old lady,--she did not know herself. She was asleep!

II.

_With my Reader._

Having silenced my Aunt Tabithy, I shall be generous en