melancholy. Women are the charms and delights of our existence. When they love, they do so with purity, with disinterestedness, with constancy. Their hearts are sanctuaries, and fit to become the centres of every pure enjoyment. I speak not, it is true, of the gay, the frivolous, or the supercilious; and yet even to many of these, the following lines are not always inappropriate or inapplicable.

Oh Woman! in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please;
And variable as the shade

By the light quivering aspen made;
When pain and anguish wring the brow,

A ministering angel thou!-Scott.

The appetite of the wanton is like the south wind of Arabia, breathing over the strings of lutes. The strings relax, and the lutes are never in tune; the girdle of love bursts from under the bosom; while love is like a tree, yielding in all seasons either blossoms or fruit. It builds its nest, as it were, with cinnamon; and gives a charm to life, as silver leaf gives greater lustre to the polish of the crystal. Men there are, however, who laugh at love! The power of ridicule alone distinguishes them from animals. In their families they are wasps, gnats, or gad-flies: terrific as lions to their wives and children; but mere mice to men.

Love is composed of all, that is delicate in happiness and pleasure it is a union of desire, tenderness, and friendship; confidence the most unbounded; and esteem the most animated and solid. Filling the entire capacity of the soul, whether in sickness, in sorrow, or in poverty, it elevates the character by purifying every passion; while it polishes the manners with a manly softness. When the flame of a love, so pure and delicate as this, goes out, a friendship, the most solid and affecting, springs from its ashes. And where love, like this, exists, far better is it to be joined in death, than by the malice of a wayward fortune, to drag on years of anxious

separation. He who is capable of acting greatly and nobly, when under no influence of affection, animated by the applause of a woman, whom he loves, would act splendidly and sublimely.

And is this the passion, which every animal, that usurps the name of man, flatters himself he is capable of feeling? As well may he imagine himself capable of forming the Hercules Farnese; of painting the exquisite water of a diamond; of composing the Messiah of Handel; or of writing Shakspeare's Hamlet, Milton's Paradise Lost, or Newton's Principia.

Of all miseries upon earth, there can be nothing to a man of refinement, so entirely odious to the soul, as that of being chained to an insolent, vain, vulgar, half-educated woman. Nor is there a fate, more sickening to the imagination, than that of a mild, modest, delicate and affectionate woman, doomed to waste her beauties and her sympathies, in behalf of

"An eating, drinking, bargaining, slandering man!"

A French painter (Nicholas Loir), in order to show how much love depends upon plenty, painted Venus warming her self before a fire; and Ceres and Bacchus retiring to a distance. How little does this idea harmonize with a Greek marble, I have seen, in which Cupid is sleeping on a lion's skin! How little, too, does it realise the generosity, the sensibility, and the rectitude of heart; the warm imagination, the elevation and the energy of soul, which M. Retz truly describes, as being the very elements of affection.

Love has several analógies with natural beauties. "What is more like love," says a German philosopher, quoted by

a Ubi idem et maximus et honestissimus amor est, aliquando præsta morte jungi quàm vitâ distrahi.-Valerius Maximus. Moore has a similar senti

ment:

Oh! I would ask no happier bed,

Than the chill wave my love lies under:

Sweeter to rest, together dead;

Far sweeter, than to live asunder.

Zimmerman, “than the feeling with which the soul is inspired, when viewing a fine country, or the sight of a magnificent valley, illumined by the setting sun?" Albano, in his picture of the Loves and the Graces, represents them, as enjoying themselves on a beautiful evening, in a valley, reclining on the banks of a rivulet. "One of them," says Dupaty, "is stretched upon the grass; and several are beckoning to him to quit his rural couch; but he will not!" Indeed, so obvious is the connexion, to which we have alluded, that the French peasant girls, when they separate, at the close of evening, frequently exclaim, "Good night! I wish you may dream, that you are walking with your lover, in a garden of flowers.”

Have we lost a beloved mistress or an affectionate friend? Do we hear a tune, of which she was enthusiastically fond; or read a poem, he passionately admired? Are not our thoughts swayed by a secret impulse, as, by the faculty of association, we recal to mind the many instances, we have received, of their affection and regard? If a melancholy pleasure is awakened by what we hear, and what we see, in familiar life, how much more is that faculty of combination enlarged, when, after a long absence, we tread the spot, or behold the scenes, which once were the objects of our mutual admiration? If, divided by distance, the lover indulges reveries of felicity among grand or beautiful scenery, the image of his mistress is immediately associated with it: and, at peace with the world, he sinks into one of those silent meditations, which, in so powerful a manner, expand the faculties of the imagination, and chasten the feelings of the heart. Such are the consolations of absence, when there subsists a true and aboriginal affection; and when that affection can boast a virginity of thought as well as of the body. Thus was it with Petrarch. When he was at Valchiusa, he fancied every tree screened his beloved Laura: when he beheld any magnificent scene among the Pyrenees, his imagination painted her standing by his side in the forest of Ardenne he heard her in every echo:

and when at Lyons, he was transported at the sight of the Rhone, because that river washes the walls of Avignon.

Love without imagination loses its principal charm: with it, it acquires a purity, that vulgar minds can never dream of. Hence, in unfrequented recesses, and in savage solitudes, the lover delights to indulge the luxury of meditation. There every object serves to increase the strength and delicacy of his passion: and all Nature, dressed in her boldest, or most beautiful drapery, wears to his imagination

a look of love:

While all the tumults of a guilty world,

Tossed by ungenerous passions, sink away.

This passion is ridiculed and calumniated by the vulgar. It was, indeed, not made for them; neither was the Portland vase, the Ionic column, or the Gnidian Venus. Yet love exists; and where it does exist, a prison is a palace; and a desert an Elysium. The force and the vigour, that it gives to life, is beautifully allegorised in the fable of Cupid and Anteros. It embraces admiration, and the sweetness of tranquillity. Two lovers, in each other's society, are the most attractive objects in Nature: for love embellishes every thing; giving grace even to ugliness itself. It is a resting place between earth and heaven. Hence the propriety of St. Catherine de Sienna's observation; that the condemned probably derive all their misery from their utter incapability of loving and of being beloved. A good woman is more consoling to the soul, than the balm of Mecca, or the balsam of liquid amber, are healing to the body. Like the magic island

a Cupid was the god of love; Anteros the god of mutual love. Gray has a beautiful imitation of an Italian sonnet by Buondelmonte.

Lusit amicitiæ interdum velatus amictu,

Et benè compositâ veste fefellit amor.

Mox iræ assumpsit cultus, faciemque minantem,
Inque odium versus, versus et in lacrymas:
Ludentem fuge, nec lacrymanti, aut crede furenti;
Idem est dissimili semper in ore Deus.

of Prospero, she is full of "sounds and sweet airs, giving delight." For Nature has granted her the power of producing every gradation of happiness; even though it may, at first view, seem foreign to her; as occasionally she paints animals and landscapes in the body of an agate or a jasper. For my own part, happy eternally happy may she be,

whose tongue

Makes Welch as sweet, as ditties highly penn'd ;

Sung by a fair Queen, in summer's bower,
With ravishing division to her lute a.

In the whirlwind of life, what so delightful to the imagination, as the bosom of love in the shade of retirement? For wisdom, severe and tasteless as some have represented her, luxuriates in the smile, that animates the cheek of affectionate innocence. Where purity of love prevails, how small to the heart are the greatest of vicissitudes!" If you repeat every word of the Alcoran," says the Persian Rosary, “and yet suffer yourself to be enslaved by love, you have not learnt your alphabet." When applied to illegitimate passion, where is the error? If applied to an honourable one, where is the truth? When Milton wrote, that love

refines

The thoughts, and heart enlarges ; hath its seat

In reason, and is judicious; is the scale

By which to heavenly love we may ascend;

was he young? Was he an enthusiast? Or was he, on the great theatre of life, only a poet? His Comus, it is true, he had written in his youth: but when he wrote this, he had been a statesman for many years; and had written largely and successfully against Morus and Salmasius. Shall we class a thorn with an oak? A nettle with a fuchsia? A pebble with a diamond? A vermes with an ant? A dodo with an

a

Henry IV., 1st part, act iii. sc. 1. See also Two Gent. Verona, act ii. sc. 5. b Felices ter, et amplius

Quos irrupta tenet copula.-HORACE.