e my own, by marriage, her who had in heart been mine through all my
college years, and who for my sake had, in the course of these, rejected
wealth and high standing in life. The heart that, for the sake of leal
faith and love, could despise wealth and its concomitants, and brave the
risk of embracing comparative poverty, even at its best estate, was not
one likely overmuch to fear that poverty when it appeared, nor flinch
with an altered tone from the position which it had adopted, when it
actually came. This, much rather, fell to my part. It preyed upon my
mind too deeply not to prove injurious in its effects; and it did this
all the more, that the voice of love, true to its own law, had the words
of hope and consolation in it, but never those of complaint. It appeared
the _acme_ of the severity of fate itself to have lived to be the mean
of placing a heart and mind so rich in disinterested affection on so
wild and waste a scene of trial.

"From an experience of fourteen years, in which there were changes in
almost all things except in the affection which bound two hearts in one,
before the hands were united, it might be expected that I should give
some eminent admonitions concerning the imprudence of men, and
particularly of students, allowing their hearts to become interested in,
and the remembrance of their minds more fraught with the rich beauty of
auburn ringlets than in the untoward confusion, for example, of
irregular Greek verbs; yet I much fear that admonition would be of no
use. If their fate be woven of a texture similar to that of mine, how
can they help it? A man may have an idea that to cling to the shelter
which he has found, and indulge in the sleep that has overtaken him amid
the stormy blasts of the waste mountains, may be little else than
opening for himself the gates of death, yet the toils of the way through
which he has already passed may also have rendered him incapable of
resisting the dangerous rest and repose of his immediate accommodation.
In regard to my own love affairs, I, throughout all these long years
which I have specified, might well have adopted, as the motto of both
mind and heart, these lines--

"'Oh, poortith cauld and restless love,
Ye wreck my peace between ye.'

I had, as has already been hinted, a rival, who, if not so devotedly
attached as I, nevertheless was by far too much so for any one who is
destined to love without encouragement. He was as rich in proporti