us
inland landing.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.]

MY RELATIONS

I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a
blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents
surviving. I have not that felicity--and sometimes think feelingly of
a passage in Browne's Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that
hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. "In such a compass of
time," he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is to
be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his
father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see
with what a face in no long time OBLIVION will look upon himself."

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single
blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I
was the only thing in it which she loved; and, when she thought I was
quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's tears. A partiality
quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether approve. She was from
morning till night poring over good books, and devotional exercises.
Her favourite volumes were Thomas a Kempis, in Stanhope's Translation;
and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the _matins_ and _complines_
regularly set down,--terms which I was at that time too young to
understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily
concerning their Papistical tendency; and went to church every
Sabbath, as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books
she studied; though, I think, at one period of her life, she told me,
she had read with great satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfortunate
Young Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in Essex-street open
one day--it was in the infancy of that heresy--she went in, liked the
sermon, and the manner of worship, and frequented it at intervals
for some time after. She came not for doctrinal points, and never
missed them. With some little asperities in her constitution, which
I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a
fine _old Christian_. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd
mind--extraordinary at a _repartee;_ one of the few occasions of her
breaking silence--else she did not much value wit. The only secular
employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting
of French beans, and dropping them into a China basin of fair water.
The odour of those tender vegetables to this day comes bac