ich give
pleasant views of life and bequeath favourable impressions of mankind.
Your wife, with whom I have had an interesting conversation, upon the
principles of aesthetical philosophy--"

"My wife! Charlotte! She knows nothing about aesthetical philosophy."

"She calls it by another name, but she understands it well enough to
illustrate the principles by example. She tells me that labour and duty
are so taken up by you--

'In den heitern Regionen
Wo die reinen Formen wohnen,'

that they become joy and beauty,--is it so?"

"I am sure that Charlotte never said anything half so poetical. But, in
plain words, the days pass with me very happily. I should be ungrateful
if I were not happy. Heaven has bestowed on me so many sources of
love,--wife, children, books, and the calling which, when one quits
one's own threshold, carries love along with it into the world beyond;
a small world in itself,--only a parish,--but then my calling links it
with infinity."

"I see; it is from the sources of love that you draw the supplies for
happiness."

"Surely; without love one may be good, but one could scarcely be happy.
No one can dream of a heaven except as the abode of love. What writer is
it who says, 'How well the human heart was understood by him who first
called God by the name of Father'?"

"I do not remember, but it is beautifully said. You evidently do not
subscribe to the arguments in Decimus Roach's 'Approach to the Angels.'"

"Ah, Mr. Chillingly! your words teach me how lacerated a man's happiness
may be if he does not keep the claws of vanity closely pared. I actually
feel a keen pang when you speak to me of that eloquent panegyric on
celibacy, ignorant that the only thing I ever published which I fancied
was not without esteem by intellectual readers is a Reply to 'The
Approach to the Angels,'--a youthful book, written in the first year
of my marriage. But it obtained success: I have just revised the tenth
edition of it."

"That is the book I will select from your library. You will be pleased
to hear that Mr. Roach, whom I saw at Oxford a few days ago, recants his
opinions, and, at the age of fifty, is about to be married; he begs me
to add, 'not for his own personal satisfaction.'"

"Going to be married!--Decimus Roach! I thought my Reply would convince
him at last."

"I shall look to your Reply to remove some lingering doubts in my own
mind."

"Doubts in favour of celibacy?"

"Well, if no