Ere yet the final judgment thou assign,
And learn my better right, too clearly proved.
Four words suffice me: I was never loved!
The palm of grief thou wilt allow is mine.

And God help those, as Holme Lee puts it, who through the livelong day see but the dull leaden arch of a loveless life! "The fiercest gust of passion that ever wrecked a soul were better than that dead torpor of the heart. Verily, to love and to suffer is better than to love not at all." The German La Fontaine's Elizabeth declares against stoic philosophers in general, that were it in her power to become as cold and insensible as the firmest of them, she would not desire that privilege: "and although the bare idea of parting from one I love causes my heart to sink within me, yet I would not for worlds be deprived of the mournful happiness of bidding them farewell." Treating of an elderly lady bespeaking a monument for her first love, who had been drowned in the Pacific some forty years before, Mr. Hawthorne expresses a conviction that this lifelong sorrow of hers had been one of the most fortunate circumstances of her history: it had given an ideality to her mind, and kept her purer and less earthly than she would otherwise have been, by withdrawing a portion of her sympathies apart from earth. "Amid the throng of enjoyments, and the pressure of worldly care, and all the warm materialism of this life, she had communed with a vision, and had been the better for such intercourse." Had separation in life, instead of by death, been their portion,

Mr. Hawthorne would probably have been fain to predicate of them what an English minstrel sings of another imaginary pair:

And both still live, and with warm thrills

On passion's memory fondly hang,

And each is sure the other feels

So to have loved was worth the pang.

Chateaubriand's Atala, dying, assures Chactas, " mon ami, . si j'étais à recommencer la vie, je preférerais encore le bonheur de vous avoir aimé quelques instants dans un exil infortuné, à toute une vie de repos dans ma patrie." The recollection of a deep and true affection, says Dr. Holmes, is rather a divine nourishment for a life to grow strong upon than a poison to destroy it. Schleiermacher, in one of his confidential letters, records a visit he has just paid to a young widower, in whom he "saw grief in a beautiful and holy form," and to whom he "knew nothing more consolatory to say, than that seeing him in his sorrow, I could not but wish that I were in a position to lose what he thus felt the loss of." Anxiety for our loved ones, he says elsewhere-and he is writing to his wife this time-has also its noble influence on our lives, and is an element that we cannot do without, and from which we ought not to wish to be exempt. Frederick Perthes, who, in retracing the course of a long married life, declares himself to have had "much suffering and sorrow, much care and anxiety," but adds, " yet, unmarried, I had not been able to live,"—had to remonstrate with

his wife, in the first years of their wedlock, on her views and practice as regards family life and contact with the world. Would she live apart from everything? But even were she to withdraw to some retirement where no sorrow, no disquiet, could reach her, she would only, he warns her, "become cold because you love only the Highest and no other object, and coldness is always a horrible thing. The sorrows and annoyances which may be our lot in the world where He has placed us, we should bear with inward tranquillity rather than endeavour to escape from them."

What though in scaly armour dressed,
Indifference may repel

The shafts of woe, in such a breast
No joy can ever dwell.

'Tis woven in the world's great plan,
And fixed by Heaven's decree,
That all the true delights of man
Should spring from Sympathy.

'Tis nature bids, and whilst the laws
Of nature we retain,

Our self-approving bosom draws

A pleasure from its pain.

Thus grief itself has comforts dear,

The sordid never know,

And ecstasy attends the tear,

When virtue bids it flow.

To love, even if not beloved, says Leigh Hunt, is to have the sweetest of faiths, and riches fineless,

which nothing can take from us but our own unworthiness, "and once to have loved truly, is to know how to continue to love everything which unlovingness has he not a hand in altering—all beauties of nature and of mind, all truth of heart, all trees, flowers, skies, hopes, and good beliefs, all dear decays of person, fading towards a twofold grave, all trusts in heaven, all faiths in the capabilities of loving man."

Why can we not one moment pause, and cherish

Love, though love turn to tears? or for hope's sake
Bless hope, albeit the thing we hope may perish?
For happiness is not in what we take,

But what we give. What matter though the thing
We cling to most should fail us? Dust to dust!
It is the feeling for the thing-the trust
In beauty somewhere, to which souls should cling.

If Mr. Thackeray is often sarcastically didactic on the hot and cold fits of gentle pairs in love-their crosses, and disappointments, and disenchantments, and all the rest of it-equally forcible are his expressions of contemptuous pity for those who escape, or try to escape, the blind archer altogether. "I should be sorry, my honest Bob," Mr. Brown writes to his nephew, “that thou didst not undergo the malady." Hit or miss, good luck or bad, "every man ought to be in love a few times in his life, and to have a smart attack of the fever. You are the better for it when it is over: the better for your misfortune if you endure it with a manly heart." And so ingenuous youth are assured, in "Pendennis," that they will

rush on their death when the doomed charmer appears. Or if they don't, Heaven help them! "As the gambler said to his dice, to love and to win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best." How reasons the lover in Mr. Coventry Patmore's long love-poem, or rather series of such :

Ah, could I put off love! Could we

Never have met! What calm, what ease!
Nay, but, alas! this remedy

Were ten times worse than the disease!

For when, indifferent, I pursue

The world's best pleasures for relief,
My heart, still sickening back to you,
Finds none like memory of its grief.