f
deceit or dishonour, and with a heart open to the eyes of all as to the
gates of heaven? What music was in that stream! Could "Sabean odours
from the spicy shores of Araby the Blest" so penetrate our soul, as that
breath, balmier than the broom on which we sat, forgetful of all other
human life! Father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts, and
cousins, and all the tribe of friends that would throw us off--if we
should be so base and mad as to marry a low-born, low-bred, ignorant,
uneducated, crafty, ay, crafty and designing beggar--were all forgotten
in our delirium--if indeed it were delirium--and not an
everlastingly-sacred devotion to nature and to truth. For in what were
we deluded? A voice--a faint and dewy voice--deadened by the earth that
fills up her grave, and by the turf that, at this very hour, is
expanding its primroses to the dew of heaven--answers, "In nothing!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" exclaims some reader in derision. "Here's an attempt at
the pathetic!--a miserable attempt indeed; for who cares about the death
of a mean hut girl?--we are sick of low life." Why, as to that matter,
who cares for the death of any one mortal being? Who weeps for the death
of the late Emperor of all the Russias? Who wept over Napoleon the
Great? When Chatham or Burke, Pitt or Fox died--don't pretend to tell
lies about a nation's tears. And if yourself, who, perhaps, are not in
low life, were to die in half an hour (don't be alarmed), all who knew
you--except two or three of your bosom friends, who, partly from being
somewhat dull, and partly from wishing to be decent, might whine--would
walk along George Street, at the fashionable hour of three, the very day
after your funeral. Nor would it ever enter their heads to abstain from
a dinner at the Club, ordered perhaps by yourself a fortnight ago, at
which time you were in rude health, merely because you had foolishly
allowed a cold to fasten upon your lungs, and carry you off in the prime
and promise of your professional life. In spite of all your critical
slang, therefore, Mr Editor, or Master Contributor to some Literary
Journal, SHE, though a poor _Scottish Herd_, was most beautiful; and
when, but a week after taking farewell of her, we went, according to our
tryst, to fold her in our arms, and was told by her father that she was
dead,--ay, dead--that she had no existence--that she was in a
coffin,--when we awoke from the dead-fit in which we had lain on the
floor of that