is voice.

"Hey day, hey day!" cried the Squire, starting up, "what's this?
bless me, Eugene!--wet through too, seemingly! Nell, run and open the
door--more wood on the fire--the pheasants for supper--and stay, girl,
stay--there's the key of the cellar--the twenty-one port--you know it.
Ah! ah! God willing, Eugene Aram shall not complain of his welcome back
to Grassdale!"

CHAPTER VIII.

AFFECTION: ITS GODLIKE NATURE.--THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN ARAM
AND MADELINE.--THE FATALIST FORGETS FATE.

Hope is a lover's staff; walk hence with that,
And manage it against despairing thoughts.
--Two Gentlemen of Verona.

If there be any thing thoroughly lovely in the human heart, it is
Affection! All that makes hope elevated, or fear generous, belongs to
the capacity of loving. For my own part, I do not wonder, in looking
over the thousand creeds and sects of men, that so many religionists
have traced their theology,--that so many moralists have wrought their
system from--Love. The errors thus originated have something in them
that charms us even while we smile at the theology, or while we neglect
the system. What a beautiful fabric would be human nature--what a divine
guide would be human reason--if Love were indeed the stratum of the
one, and the inspiration of the other! What a world of reasonings, not
immediately obvious, did the sage of old open to our inquiry, when he
said the pathetic was the truest part of the sublime. Aristides, the
painter, created a picture in which an infant is represented sucking a
mother wounded to the death, who, even in that agony, strives to prevent
the child from injuring itself by imbibing the blood mingled with the
milk. [Note: Intelligitur sentire mater et timere, ne mortuo lacte
sanguinem lambat.] How many emotions, that might have made us
permanently wiser and better, have we lost in losing that picture!

Certainly, Love assumes a more touching and earnest semblance, when we
find it in some retired and sequestered hollow of the world; when it is
not mixed up with the daily frivolities and petty emotions of which a
life passed in cities is so necessarily composed: we cannot but believe
it a deeper and a more absorbing passion: perhaps we are not always
right in the belief.

Had one of that order of angels to whom a knowledge of the future, or
the seraphic penetration into the hidden heart of man is forbidden,
stayed his wings over the lo