1.

Love?-I will tell thee what it is to love!

It is to build with human thoughts a shrine,
Where Hope sits brooding like a beauteous dove;
Where Time seems young, and Life a thing divine.
All tastes, all pleasures, all desires combine

To consecrate this sanctuary of bliss.

Above, the stars in shroudless beauty shine;

Around, the streams their flowery margins kiss;

And if there's heaven on earth, that heaven is surely this!

2.

Yes, this is Love, the stedfast and the true,

The immortal glory which hath never set;

The best, the brightest boon the heart e'er knew :

Of all life's sweets the very sweetest yet!

Oh! who but can recall the eve they met

To breathe, in some green walk, their first young vow, While summer flowers with moonlight dews were wet, And winds sigh'd soft around the mountain's brow, And all was rapture then which is but memory now! The dream of life indeed can last with none

of us,

As if the thing beloved were all a Saint,

And every place she entered were a shrine :*

but it must be our own fault, when it has past

* GONDIBERT.

away, if the realities disappoint us: they are not

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weary, stale, flat and unprofitable," unless we ourselves render them so. The preservation of the species is not the sole end for which love was implanted in the human heart; that end the Almighty might as easily have effected by other means: not so the developement of our moral nature, which is its higher purpose. The comic poet asserts that

Verum illud verbum est vulgo quod dici solet,

Omnes sibi esse melius malle, quam alteri :* but this is not true in love. The lover never says

Heus proximus sum egomet mihi ;*

He knows and understands the falsehood of the

Greek adage,

φιλεῖ δ ̓ ἑαυτοῦ πλεῖον οὐδείς οὐδένα,

and not lovers alone, but husbands and wives, and parents feel that there are others who are dearer to them than themselves. Little do they know of human nature who speak of marriage as doubling our pleasures and dividing our griefs it doubles, or more than doubles both.

**TERENCE.

LEONARD was not more than eight and twenty when he obtained a living, a few miles from Doncaster. He took his bride with him to the vicarage. The house was as humble as the benefice, which was worth less than £50. a year; but it was soon made the neatest cottage in the country round, and upon a happier dwelling the sun never shone. A few acres of good glebe were attached to it; and the garden was large enough to afford healthful and pleasurable

employment to its owners.

The course of true

love never ran more smoothly; but its course was short.

O how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away!*

Little more than five years from the time of their marriage had elapsed, before a headstone in the adjacent churchyard told where the remains of Margaret Bacon had been deposited in the 30th year of her age.

When the stupor and the agony of that bereavement had past away, the very intensity of Leonard's affection became a source of consolation. Margaret had been to him a purely ideal object during the years of his youth; death had again rendered her such. Imagination had beautified and idolized her then; faith sanctified and glorified her now. She had been to him on earth all that he had fancied, all that he had hoped, all that he had desired. She would again be so in Heaven. And this second union

* SHAKESPEARE.

nothing could impede, nothing could interrupt, nothing could dissolve. He had only to keep himself worthy of it by cherishing her memory, hallowing his heart to it while he performed a parent's duty to their child; and so doing to await his own summons, which must one day come, which every day was brought nearer, and which any day might bring.

'Tis the only discipline we are born for;

All studies else are but as circular lines,

And death the centre where they must all meet.*

The same feeling which from his childhood had refined Leonard's heart, keeping it pure and undefiled, had also corroborated the natural strength of his character, and made him firm of purpose. It was a saying of Bishop Andrews that "good husbandry is good divinity;" "the truth whereof," says Fuller, "no wise man will deny." Frugality he had always practised as a needful virtue, and found that in an especial manner it brings with it its own reward. He now resolved upon scrupulously setting apart a fourth of his small income to

* MASSINGER.