revelyan will soon be entitled
to his furlough; but he proposes not to take it till I go home.

I shall write in a very different style from this to my father. To him I
shall represent the marriage as what it is, in every respect except its
effect on my own dreams of happiness--a most honourable and happy event;
prudent in a worldly point of view; and promising all the felicity
which strong mutual affection, excellent principles on both sides,
good temper, youth, health, and the general approbation of friends can
afford. As for myself, it is a tragical denouement of an absurd plot.
I remember quoting some nursery rhymes, years ago, when you left me in
London to join Nancy at Rothley Temple or Leamington, I forget which.
Those foolish lines contain the history of my life.

"There were two birds that sat on a stone;
One flew away, and there was but one.
The other flew away, and then there was none;
And the poor stone was left all alone."

Ever, my dearest Margaret, yours

T. B. MACAULAY.

A passage from a second letter to the same person deserves to be quoted,
as an instance of how a good man may be unable to read aright his own
nature, and a wise man to forecast his own future. "I feel a growing
tendency to cynicism and suspicion. My intellect remains; and is likely,
I sometimes think, to absorb the whole man. I still retain, (not only
undiminished, but strengthened by the very events which have deprived
me of everything else,) my thirst for knowledge; my passion for holding
converse with the greatest minds of all ages and nations; any power of
forgetting what surrounds me, and of living with the past, the future,
the distant, and the unreal. Books are becoming everything to me. If
I had at this moment my choice of life, I would bury myself in one of
those immense libraries that we saw together at the universities,
and never pass a waking hour without a book before me." So little was
Macaulay aware that, during the years which were to come, his thoughts
and cares would be less than ever for himself, and more for others,
and that his existence would be passed amidst a bright atmosphere of
affectionate domestic happiness, which, until his own death came, no
accident was thenceforward destined to overcloud.

But, before his life assumed the equable and prosperous tenor in which
it continued to the end, one more trouble was in store for him. Long
before the last letters to his sister Margaret had been written,