, with our powers of
comprehension, increase our powers of admiration. I shall
never feel the real beauty of military music, or the full
sense of the muffled roll of the drum, till it leads me to
battle, or marshals me to execution. Is it the same with my
affections? Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is not in my nature
passionately to love where I have never suffered. Perhaps if
it had been my fate, after having from the days of childhood
formed to myself an ideal image of what my soul could worship;
after having met with the realisation of that dream of my
fancy--a realisation as much more beautiful, as much more
enchanting as life is superior in its most perfect form to the
highest stretch of genius in the painter; if it had been my
fate, after having watched, and followed, and loved, and
doated on this woman during a year, which seemed to me but as
an hour, so great was the love I bore her; had it been my fate
to possess her, to call her mine, perhaps I should only have
been, after a while, very fond of her, as men are of their
wives--very glad to find her at home, after a day spent in the
House of Commons, at one time of the year, or in shooting, at
another. She might only have been one object to me among many
others. It might have been so, though it is difficult to
believe it; but we must believe what we see, nor dare to
assert that the idol enshrined in our heart in hope, in fear,
and in suffering, would have maintained its sway in the dull
atmosphere of secure possession.

"We arrived at Elmsley on a lovely evening, and not a room in
the house, not a spot in the grounds did I leave unvisited.
While Edward and Lawson were engaged on the county registers
and reports, as if their whole souls were bound up in them, I
stood on the verandah, and looked on each well-known object in
that lovely view till the whole was wrapt in darkness. That
gradual obscuring of each spot which, when I first stood
there, was glowing in the light of the evening sun, reminded
me of my last conversation with you, when, in answer to the
confession you extorted from me, you took up a book from your
table and pointed to these lines, which I only read once, but
have remembered ever since:--

'Nay, rather steel thy melting heart
To act the martyr's sternest part;
To watch, with firm unshrinking eye,
Thy darling visions as they die;
Till all bright hopes and hues of day
Have faded into twilight gray.'--_Christian Year_.

"B