ite him with the whole of their time, and the whole of their heart.
He suffered much for that improvidence; but he was too just and too kind
to permit that others should suffer with him; and it is not for one who
obtained by inheritance a share of his inestimable affection to regret a
weakness to which he considers himself by duty bound to refer.

How keenly Macaulay felt the separation from his sister it is impossible
to do more than indicate. He never again recovered that tone of thorough
boyishness, which had been produced by a long unbroken habit of gay
and affectionate intimacy with those younger than himself; indulged in
without a suspicion on the part of any concerned that it was in its very
nature transitory and precarious. For the first time he was led to doubt
whether his scheme of life was indeed a wise one; or, rather, he began
to be aware that he had never laid out any scheme of life at all. But
with that unselfishness which was the key to his character and to much
of his career, (resembling in its quality what we sometimes admire in
a woman, rather than what we ever detect in a man,) he took successful
pains to conceal his distress from those over whose happiness it
otherwise could not have failed to cast a shadow.

"The attachment between brothers and sisters," he writes in November
1832, "blameless, amiable, and delightful as it is, is so liable to be
superseded by other attachments that no wise man ought to suffer it to
become indispensable to him. That women shall leave the home of their
birth, and contract ties dearer than those of consanguinity, is a law
as ancient as the first records of the history of our race, and as
unchangeable as the constitution of the human body and mind. To repine
against the nature of things, and against the great fundamental law of
all society, because, in consequence of my own want of foresight, it
happens to bear heavily on me, would be the basest and most absurd
selfishness.

"I have still one more stake to lose. There remains one event for which,
when it arrives, I shall, I hope, be prepared. From that moment, with
a heart formed, if ever any man's heart was formed, for domestic
happiness, I shall have nothing left in this world but ambition.
There is no wound, however, which time and necessity will not render
endurable; and, after all, what am I more than my fathers,--than the
millions and tens of millions who have been weak enough to pay double
price for some favou