errors cognizable to the world's eye; but steering an open, honourable, upright course, may defy the scrutiny of envious eyes, and claim as their due from society at large, that tribute of admiration which we are ever ready to bestow. But the unspeakable anguish with which we behold any departure from this honourable course of conduct, is perhaps the strongest proof, how intimately our sense of all that is admirable in the human character is interwoven with our affections. I do not pretend to say, that we are all so influenced by right feeling, or so well assured of the precise line of demarcation between good and evil, as to lament over the errors of those we love, exactly in proportion to their moral culpability. Far from it. But let that which all hearts can feel-let the stigma of the world's disgrace fall upon them-let it at the same time be voluntarily incurred, and richly merited, and ye who tell us of the loss of friends or fortune, of poverty, or sickness or death, match the agony of this conviction if you can. No; it has neither companion nor similitude. In the wide range of human calamity there is not one that bears any proportion to this.

It may be said of pity also, that there are

cases in which we are scarcely aware of its forming any part of our love; but is not our love at such times languid, spiritless, and inert? No sooner does sickness or misfortune assail the object of our regard, than it assumes a new life, and all that was dear before, becomes doubly valuable beneath the pressure of affliction, or on the brink of the grave. How often has pity brought to light a love whose existence we were unconscious of before; and those whom we should once have deemed it impossible to regard with tenderness, have become, under the shadow of misfortune, the objects of our most devoted affection.

The power which love possesses of enhancing our enjoyments, is of itself sufficient to entitle this sentiment to a high place amongst those that are most influential in their operations upon the human mind. I appeal to the young, or rather to the old who have not forgotten their youth, whether love has not at some period of their existence, given a life and vividness to the aspect of creation, a music to sound, and an intensity to all their capabilities of simple and natural delight, which, while the enchantment lasted, seemed to raise the pleasures of earth above this sublunary sphere,

though in remembrance it claims nothing but a passing smile, or perhaps a faint sigh of regret, that we have lost so much of what constituted the life of our early existence. We smile because we have lived to awake from our delusion-to know that the sunshine which then appeared to us a flood of radiance pouring its golden streams over hill and grove, and diffusing the principle of happiness through all the secret mysteries of nature, was but the ordinary light of day, liable to be obscured by mists, and hid from us by the intervention of dense and gloomy clouds. We smile because the brook that murmured at our feet with such continuous and unbroken melody, to our young imaginations pure, and clear, and vivid, like the secret springs of unsophisticated feeling, since then has wearied us with the constant monotony of its sound, seeming to tell of little else than pebbles and clear water. We smile, because the song of at least half the birds whose voices were then all music, has degenerated into a mere chirp; but most of all we smile, because that bright being whose brow was garnished with a glory-at whose feet we would have laid the accumulated treasures of the whole world had we

possessed them—the idol whom irreligiously we had placed upon the high altar of the soul, has stepped down from that exalted pedestal, and passing forth into the world endowed only with the customary functions of humanity, has mixed in the common avocations of life, and become

“An eating, drinking, bargain-making man.”

Or if after such a retrospection, perchance we sigh, it is not so much with any positive regret, as with a vague sense of some indefinite loss a mere illusion-a false colouring-a deceitful tone-an evanescent charm which owed its existence to the infatuation of the mind, and yet we sigh; because not the longest period of man's natural life, not the rapid and entire success of all our schemes, not the riches of prosperity poured into our lap, around our feet, and even beyond the circle of our hopes, can restore what is lost to us, when we are driven to the conviction that we can love no more. It was an idle phantasy, we tell ourselves in after life, and we join in the ridicule that reprobates this foolish passion; but would we not give all that time and tears have purchased for us, to sit again in the bright sunshine, to look round upon the fields and the

woods, to listen to the singing of the birds, and, without the excitement of art, or the aid of borrowed attributes, to feel each individual moment sufficient in its fulness of felicity to lull the memory of the past, and soothe down the anxieties of the future, concentrating into one point of present time, all that we spend after years in search of, and realizing without purchase, and without sacrifice, in one single isolated particle of blissful experience, the happiness for which countless myriads are pining in vain.

It is a strong proof of the poetical character of love, that all the contempt, and all the ridicule it meets with in the world, are unable to deprive it of the legitimate place which it holds in the popular works of our best authors. Caleb Williams is the only novel that occurs to me, in which the interest of the story is in no way connected with love. The author has supplied this deficiency, by conducting the reader through his pages with an intensity of anxiety, scarcely equalled elsewhere; but well as this story is penned, we arrive in the end at the unsatisfactory conviction, that we have been reading an uncongenial, hard, bad book, the whole tenor of which is in direct opposition to the