LOVE-LOSS AND LOVELESS.

To the Laureate in the hour of anguish and bereavement,

This truth came borne with bier and pall,
He felt it when he sorrow'd most,

'TIS BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST,
THAN NEVER TO HAVE LOVED AT ALL.

For, to apply a meditation of Wordsworth's:

Then was the truth received into his heart,
That, under heaviest sorrow earth can bring,
If under the affliction somewhere do not grow
Honour which could not else have been, a faith,
An elevation, and a sanctity,

If new strength be not given, or old restored,
The blame is ours, not Nature's.

Tenderly, after his wont, the Archbishop of Cambray says: "Il en coûte beaucoup d'être sensible à l'amitié; mais ceux qui ont cette sensibilité aiment mieux souffre que d'être insensibles."

After spending the third of a year at Montpelier, Miss Berry records in her Journal her leaving that place without the slightest feeling of the regret one

generally experiences on quitting a spot where one has stayed four months, and which one sees, perhaps, for the last time. That is the "advantage," she infers, of not having formed friendships, and having scarcely seen any one person that she could regard with less indifference than another. "But these are advantages," she goes on to say, "of which I am hardly ambitious, and I would rather a thousand times be enduring at this moment all that depression, sadness, and regret which one suffers in parting from dear friends, than this present state of cheerless indifference and cold tranquillity." The love-crossed old spinster lady in Mr. Peacock's last fiction, by no means resents a heedless reminder of sorrows past: the day-dreams of youth, however fallacious, are to her as to others a composite of pain and pleasure : for the sake of the latter the former is endured, nay, even cherished in memory. "I find a charm,” she declares, “in the recollection far preferable to

The waveless calm, the slumber of the dead,

which weighs on the minds of those who have never loved, or never earnestly." Justly admired as a charming passage in one of Lady Rachael Russell's letters is the following: "My friendships have made all the joys and troubles of my life; and yet who would live and not love? Those who have tried the insipidness of it would, I believe, never choose it. Mr. Waller says, 'tis (with singing) all we know they do above!" Who would live and not love? she

asks. Yet some there have been who conducted
their life methodically on that system. Fontenelle
avowed that he had never once loved in earnest nor
wished to be loved; and with this cold constitution
of his he coddled himself up to the age of one hun-
dred years.
"How I pity you," Mme. de Tencin
once said to him: "that's not a heart you have in-
side your chest there; it's a brain, just as in the
head." But men with a heart have professed a pre-
ference of tranquil apathy to the risk of great sorrow
at a great loss. Ben Jonson's Lovel comes for his
part to this conclusion, on the subject of short-lived
joy:

Better be never happy, than to feel
A little of it, and then lose it ever.

That is a string upon which Rousseau's Saint-Preux harps, with nervous, resonant touch: "il valait mieux ne jamais goûter la félicité, que la goûter et la perdre." And yet he deceives himself, belies his better nature, in so saying, and afterwards owns the error: "J'aime mieux . . . . les regrets qui déchirent mon âme, que d'être à jamais heureux sans ma Julie." But his first thought is at any rate the first thought of many a sufferer. Lessing lost his wife after a brief twelvemonth's union; and in the bitterness of bereavement he wrote to a friend. How

do I curse the hour when I sought to be happy like other men! How often do I wish I could return to my former isolated condition, and be content to be nothing, do nothing, desire nothing but what the

moment commands." Some such thought, in the guise of a shuddering apprehension, must have been passing through, if not abiding in, Wordsworth's mind, when in one of his best Poems founded on the Affections, he utters the deprecation,

Ah, gentle Love! if ever thought was thine
To store up kindred hours for me, thy face
Turn from me, gentle Love! nor let me walk
Within the sound of Emma's voice, nor know
Such happiness as I have known to-day.

Who has not thought for a moment, sometimes,— Mr. Dickens asks, in describing Arthur Clennam gazing on the serene river from his open windowthat it might be better to flow away monotonously, like the river, and to compound for its insensibility to happiness with its insensibility to pain?

Swift tells Dr. Stopford he thinks there is not a greater folly than that of entering into too strict and particular a friendship, with the loss of which a man must be absolutely miserable. To another correspondent the Dean had written in nearly the same words, five days before: "I am of opinion that there is not a greater folly than to contract too great and intimate a friendship, which must always leave the survivor miserable." To Pope, again, he writes in after years: "I do not only wish, as you ask me, that I was unacquainted with any deserving person, but almost that I never had a friend." Two years after which, we find Pope writing to Swift, in mournful anticipation of his mother's approaching

end—“so painful is it even to enjoy the tender pleasures "-that formerly he had made strong efforts to get and to deserve a friend; but "perhaps it were wiser never to attempt it, but live extempore, and look upon the world only as a place to pass through, just pay your hosts their due, disperse a little charity, and hurry on." The Countess of Kerry, another of Swift's correspondents, informs him of her system of life as now for a good while past consisting in "a state of indolence and indifference; and, if I could avoid the pains of body and mind, not to seek further after those points in life I so long and vainly pursued." So, in effect, the complaining daughter in Shakspeare's stanzas:

Not
age, but

sorrow, over me hath power;
I might as yet have been a spreading flower,
Fresh to myself, if I had self-applied
Love to myself, and to no love beside.

Madame de Charrière was almost a child when she wrote to her brother-who died very soon afterwards these réflexions attristées et bien múûres : "L'on vante souvent les avantages de l'amitié, mais quelquefois je doute s'ils sont plus grands que les inconvénients. Quand on a des amis, les uns meurent, les autres souffrent; . . . . leur perte nous accable, leur infidélité nous fait un tort réel, et les bonheurs ne sont point comme les malheurs; il y en a peu d'imprévus. L'on n'y est pas si sensible. La bonne santé d'un ami ne nous réjouit point tant que ses maladies nous inquiètent. . . . . Je crois qu'il