f our destiny, do we repose or toil: he who never knows pain knows
but the half of pleasure. The lot of whatever is most noble on the earth
below falls not amidst the rosy Gardels of the Epicurean. We may envy
the man who enjoys and rests; but the smile of Heaven settles rather on
the front of him who labours and aspires.

And did Philip ever regret the circumstances that had given him Fanny
for the partner of his life? To some who take their notions of the
Ideal from the conventional rules of romance, rather than from their
own perceptions of what is true, this narrative would have been more
pleasing had Philip never loved but Fanny. But all that had led to that
love had only served to render it more enduring and concentred. Man's
strongest and worthiest affection is his last--is the one that unites
and embodies all his past dreams of what is excellent--the one from
which Hope springs out the brighter from former disappointments--the one
in which the MEMORIES are the most tender and the most abundant--the one
which, replacing all others, nothing hereafter can replace.

......

And now ere the scene closes, and the audience, whom perhaps the actors
may have interested for a while, disperse, to forget amidst the pursuits
of actual life the Shadows that have amused an hour, or beguiled a care,
let the curtain fall on one happy picture:--

It is some years after the marriage of Philip and Fanny. It is a summer
morning. In a small old-fashioned room at Beaufort Court, with its
casements open to the gardens, stood Philip, having just entered; and
near the window sat Fanny, his boy by her side. She was at the mother's
hardest task--the first lessons to the first-born child; and as the boy
looked up at her sweet earnest face with a smile of intelligence on
his own, you might have seen at a glance how well understood were the
teacher and the pupil. Yes: whatever might have been wanting in the
Virgin to the full development of mind, the cares of the mother had
supplied. When a being was born to lean on her alone--dependent on
her providence for life--then hour after hour, step after step, in the
progress of infant destinies, had the reason of the mother grown in the
child's growth, adapting itself to each want that it must foresee, and
taking its perfectness and completion from the breath of the New Love!

The child caught sight of Philip and rushed to embrace him.

"See!" whispered Fanny, as she also hung upon him