ithout long years of bitterness? Can Nature's wounds be
cicatrized, or her soft feelings seared, without a thousand secret
pangs? Hath it been no trial to see youthful bloom departing, and middle
age creep on, without some intimate one to share the solitude of life?
Ay, and the coming prospect too--hath it greater consolations than the
retrospect? How faintly common friends can fill that hollow of the
heart! How feebly can their kindness, at the warmest, imitate the
sympathies and love of married life! And in the days of sickness, or the
hour of death--to be lonely, childless, husbandless, to be lightly cared
for, little missed--who can wonder that all those bruised and broken
yearnings should ferment within the solitary mind, and some, times sour
up the milk of human kindness? Be more considerate, more just, more
loving to that injured heart of woman; it hath loved deeply in its day;
but imperative duty or untoward circumstances nipped those early
blossoms, and often generosity towards others, or the constancy of
youthful blighted love, has made it thus alone. There was an age in this
world's history, and may be yet again (if Heart is ever to be monarch of
this social sphere), when those who lived and died as Jephthah's
daughter, were reckoned worthily with saints and martyrs; Heed thou,
thus, of many such, for they have offered up their hundred warm
yearnings, a hecatomb of human love, to God, the betrothed of their
affections; and they move up and down among this inconsiderate world,
doing good, Sisters of Charity, full of pure benevolence, and beneficent
beyond the widow's mite. Heed kinder then, and blush for very shame, O
man and woman! looking on this noble band of ill-requited virgins;
remember all their trials, and imitate their deeds; for among the legion
of that unreguarded sisterhood whom you coldly call old maids, are often
seen the world's chief almoners of warm unselfish sympathy, generous in
mind, if not in means, and blooming with the immortal youth of charity
and kindliness.

CHAPTER II.

HOW THE DAUGHTER HAS A HEART; AND, WHAT IS COMMONER, A LOVER.

Yes, Maria Dillaway, though Sir Thomas's own daughter, had a heart, a
warm and good one: it was her only beauty, but assuredly at once the
best adornment and cosmetic in the world. The mixture of two such
conflicting characters as her father and mother might (with common
Providence to bless the pair) unitedly produce heart; although their
plebei