An instance, partly ludicrous, illustrates her tender solicitude for him; and it also shows how the mere idea of an event has, with a person of her genius, the power of the actual occurrence. The coachman chanced to overset and considerably damage the empty family carriage. When told of it, she was indifferent until the idea of danger to her father struck her; then, exclaiming, "My God! had M. Necker been in it, he might have been killed," she rushed to the luckless driver, and burst on him with a storm of denunciations, mixed with expostulatory precautions as to the future. When her father died, Madame de Stael was plunged into despairing grief, from which she aroused herself for a vain effort to make the public share in the profound admiration and love she felt for him. It was one of her greatest trials that she could not succeed in this fond undertaking. Perhaps she was not so much deceived in her exalted estimate of her father as has been supposed. But he lacked that egotistical dash, those impulsive displays of daring and brilliancy, which are needed to make a sensation, and to secure quickly a great and lasting popularity. During the thirteen years that she survived him, the thought of him seemed constantly present; and she often said, "My father is waiting for me on the other shore." The touching words, addressed to Chateaubriand a little while before she crossed over, in which she summed up her life, were these: "I have always been the same, intense and sad. I have loved God, my father, and liberty." The unhappy Letitia Landon found a congenial friend in her father, the early loss of whom was the first in the sad series of her misfortunes. She closes her poem of "The Troubadour" with an affecting tribute to his memory:

My heart hath said no name but thine Shall be on this last page of mine.

Such examples as the foregoing, showing what a treasure of help and joy the friendship of parent and child may yield to them, should teach us to think more of it, and to cultivate with greater fidelity the conditions of so blessed an experience.

FRIENDSHIPS OF SISTERS AND BROTHERS.

THE next class of friendships consists of those formed between brothers and sisters. In this relation meet many favorable conditions for carrying sympathy to a great height, when the blinding effect of early familiarity and the palling effect of routine are prevented or neutralized. The organic affinities and heritage derived from their common parentage, with the memories and hopes they have in common, are, of themselves, endearing bonds. Then there are differences enough in the boy and the girl to give their communion contrasts and zest. Unless they are frigid, selfish, or absorbed in counter directions, or are the subjects of some unfortunate incongruity, a rich friendship spontaneously arises between a brother and a sister who advance to maturity in the same dwelling. A gifted woman, the author of "Counterparts" and "Charles Auchester," who, devoured by the flame of her own genius, died too young, has written, somewhat extravagantly, "O blessed sympathy of sisterhood with brotherhood! Surpassing all other friendship, leavening with angel solicitude the purest love of earth. No lovership like that of the brother and the sister, however passionate their spirits, when they truly love." Narcissus, in the classic fable, had a lovely sister, to whom he was most fondly attached. They were the images and mirrors of each other. It was only when death had snatched her from his side, that, pining under his bereavement, wandering by fountains and rivers, lie caught glimpses of his own reflection; and, mistaking the illusory show for his lost companion, fell in love with himself, and languished away till rejoined with her in the pale world of Hades.

Hardly any picture in literature is more famous than that of the friendship of Orestes and Electra. What divine beauty, what tragic pathos, what immortal truth, are in it! And the friendship of Antigone and Polynices is similar. With the Greeks this relation was under the special protection of Apollo and Diana, the divine brother and sister, whose physical representatives were the sun and moon. Iphigenia, priestess in Tauris, in her distress for her brother, prays to the goddess for pity and help:

For thou, Diana, lov'st thy gentle brother Beyond what earth and heaven can offer thee, And dost, with quiet yearning, ever turn Thy virgin face to his eternal light.

A striking example of this relation, sustained with great fullness and warmth, was given by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica in the sixth century. In the ecclesiastic legends connected with. The canonization of this brother and sister, it is narrated that they were accustomed to meet at a place intermediate between their retreats on Mount Cassino and at Plombariola, and to spend the night together in spiritual conversation and communion on the joys of heaven. Three days after their last interview, Scholastica died in her solitude. Benedict, rapt in contemplation on his mount at that moment, is said to have seen the soul of his sister ascend to heaven in the shape of a dove. He immediately sent for her body, and had it laid, with tender and solemn ceremonies, in the tomb which he had previously prepared for himself. The friendship of Tasso and his sister Cornelia has often been the theme of painting and of song. When, escaping from Ferrara, lacerated, irritated, melancholy, the poor half-mad poet fled from his persecutors, he thought he would test the affection of this early playmate and friend, whom he had not seen for many a weary year. Disguising himself as a shepherd, he presented himself before her in her home at Sorrento. He drew so piteous a picture of her brother's misfortunes and condition that she fainted. As soon as she recovered, he made himself known; and Torquato and Cornelia, with a swift revival of their old affection, were locked in a tender embrace, as has been described by Mrs. Hemans in a poem of extreme beauty and power of feeling.

The peaceful retreat, the glorious scenery, the gentle nursing, restored him to health and cheerfullness. Alas that he would not stay, but rushed away to his fate The beautiful and chivalrous Margaret of Navarre was a pattern of enthusiastic devotion to her brother, Francis I When Charles V carried him prisoner to Madrid, and he was dying there, she went to him through every peril, and, by her nursing, restored him. She then formed a friendship with the sister of Charles, and induced her secretly to espouse Francis, thus securing his deliverance by his imperial brother-in-law. The enduring monuments of art with which Francis embellished his kingdom were her inspiration. At a distance from him in his last illness, "she went every day, and sat down on a stone in the middle of the road, to catch the first glimpse of a messenger afar off. And she said, "Ah whoever shall come to announce the recovery of the king my brother, though he be tired, jaded, soiled, dishevelled, I will kiss him and embrace him as though he were the finest gentleman in the kingdom." Hearing of his death, she soon followed him. It is painful to know that the love of Francis to her was not a tithe of hers to him. He loved her, but treated her with a good deal of the feudal tyranny which belonged to the age. She deserved from him boundless tenderness and generosity. Sir Philip and Mary Sidney shared the same studies and labors, and were endeared even more by similarity of soul than by their common parentage. Together they translated the Psalms. The name and dedication which the brother gave to his principal work are an imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." Spenser refers to her as "most resembling in shape and spirit her brother dear." She wrote a beautiful elegy on his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental philosopher, Robert Boyle, and his sister, Catherine, the very accomplished and famous countess of Ranelagh, were a noted pair of friends. Bishop Burnet has drawn for us a delightful picture of them. He says, "They were pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided; for, as he lived with her above forty years, so he did not outlive her a week." The countess "lived the longest on the most public scene, and made the greatest figure, in all the revolutions of these kingdoms for above fifty years, of any woman of that age." She laid out her time, her interest, and her estate, with the greatest zeal and success, in doing good to others, without regard to sects or relations. "When any party was down, she had credit and zeal enough to serve them; and she employed these so effectually, that, in the next turn, she had a new stock of credit, which she laid out wholly in that labor of love in which she spent her life. And though some particular opinions might shut her up in a divided communion, yet her soul was never of a party. She divided her charities and friendships both, her esteem as well as her bounty, with the truest regard to merit and her own obligations, without any difference made upon the account of opinion. She had, with a vast reach of knowledge and apprehension, an universal affability and easiness of access, an humility that descended to the meanest persons and concerns, an obliging kindness and readiness to advise those who had no occasion for any farther assistance from her. And with all those and many other excellent qualities, she had the deepest sense of religion, and the most constant turning of her thoughts and discourses that way, that has been, perhaps, in our age. Such a sister became such a brother; and it was but suitable to both their characters, that they should have improved the relation under which they were born to the more exalted and endearing one of friend." Two of the most distinguished in the long roll of eminent astronomers are a brother and a sister, Sir William and Caroline Herschel. The story of their united labors, how, for thousands of nights, side by side they sat and watched and calculated and wrote, one sweeping the telescopic heavens, the other assisting, and noting down the results; how, with one spirit and one interest, they grew old together and illustrious together; their several achievements, both at home and in observatories on strange shores to which they voyaged, always associated; with what affectionate care she trained the favorite nephew, who was to burnish into still more effulgent brightness the star-linked name of Herschel, the story of all this is full of attractiveness, and forms one of the warm and poetic episodes in the high, cold annals of science. The union of John Aikin and his sister Letitia, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, in life, tastes, labors, was uncommonly close and complete. The narrative of it; so warm, substantial, and healthy was it, leaves a pleasing and invigorating influence on the sympathies of those who read it. They composed together several of their excellent and most useful literary works. While Mrs. Barbauld was tarrying at Geneva, her brother addressed a letter in verse to her:

Yet one dear wish still struggles in my breast, And paints one darling object unpossessed. How many years have whirled their rapid course Since we, sole streamlets from one honored source, In fond affection, as in blood, allied, Have wandered devious from each other's side, Allowed to catch alone some transient view, Scarce long enough to think the vision true! Oh! then, while yet some zest of life remains; While transport yet can swell the beating veins; While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat, And fancy still retains some genial heat; When evening bids each busy task be o'er, Once let us meet again, to part no more!

That evening came. In the village of Stoke Newington, they spent the last twenty years of their lives, in that close neighborhood which admitted of the daily, almost hourly, interchanges of mind and heart. There was a friendship of great strength between Goethe and his sister Cornelia. She was only a year younger than her brother, his companion in plays, lessons, and trials, bound to him by the closest ties and innumerable associations. While she was yet in the cradle, he prepared dolls and amusements for her, and was very jealous of all who came between them.

They grew up in such union, that, as he afterwards said, they might have been taken for twins. The sternness of their father drove them into a more confiding sympathy. When he had become a young man, and was accustomed to make frequent excursions, he says, "I was again drawn towards home, and that by a magnet which attracted me strongly at all times: it was my sister." Cornelia had superior endowments of mind, great force and truth of character; but she keenly felt her want of beauty, "a want richly compensated by the unbounded confidence and love borne to her by all her female friends." And yet Goethe says, "When my connection with Gretchen was torn asunder, my sister consoled me the more warmly, because she felt the secret satisfaction of having got rid of a rival; and I, too, could not but feel a great pleasure when she did me the justice to assure me that I was the only one who truly loved, understood, and esteemed her." At twenty-three, Cornelia was married to one of Goethe's intimate friends, Schlosser; and, in four years, she died. In one of her brother's frequent allusions to her, this striking trait is recorded: "Her eyes were not the finest I have ever seen, but the deepest, behind which you expected the most meaning; and when they expressed any affection, any love, their glance was without its equal." In his autobiography, written long, long after her death, he says,

"As I lost this beloved, incomprehensible being but too early, I felt inducement enough to picture her excellence to myself; and so there arose within me the conception of a poetic whole, in which it might have been possible to exhibit her individuality: no other form could be thought of for it than that of the Richardsonian romance. But the tumult of the world called me away from this beautiful and pious design, as it has from so many others; and nothing now remains for me but to call up, for a moment, that blessed spirit, as if by the aid of a magic mirror."

A relation of a more absorbing character than the foregoing existed between Jacobi and his sister Lena. "For a long series of years," Steffens writes, "she lived one life with her brother, even ennobling and exalting him by her presence. She took part in all his studies, all his controversies; and changed the still self-communion of the lonely man into a long conversation." There are many accounts, given by contemporaries, of her minute carefullness for him and unwearied devotion to him. Some make the picture a little comical, from the excess of coddling; but all agree as to the unfailing and affectionate sincerity of their attachment.

There was an uncommon friendship between Chateaubriand and his youngest sister, Lucile, a girl of extreme beauty, genius, spirituality, and melancholy. He says of those years, "I grew up with my sister Lucile: our friendship constituted the whole of our lives." "Her thoughts were all sentiments." "Her elegance, sweetness, imaginativeness, and impassioned sensibility, presented a combination of Greek and German genius." "Our principal recreation consisted in walking, side by side, on the great Mall: in spring, on a carpet of primroses; in autumn, on beds of withered foliage; in winter, on a covering of snow. Young like the primroses, sad like the dry leaves, and pure as the new-fallen snow, there was a harmony between our recreations and ourselves." Lucile first persuaded her brother to write. Afterwards he says, "We undertook works in common: we passed days in mutual consultation, in communicating to each other what we had done, and what we purposed to do." The lamentation he breathed over her grave, when she died, is one of the most affecting passages in his long autobiography.

Ernst and Charlotte Schleiermacher were a choice and ever-faithful pair of friends. The published life and letters of the great preacher reveal the full beauty and importance of this relation. Their correspondence is filled equally with the manifestations of varied intelligence and of congenial feeling. Sharing all their experience in affectionate intercourse, or in full and cordial letters, they appeared thus to find their pleasures heightened, their perplexities cleared, their trials alleviated. To this noble divine, so celebrated for his profound scholarship, his enthusiastic piety, his exalted sensibility, and his heroic aims, Charlotte was knit by affinities of character and life, even more closely than by those of blood and name.

The souls and experiences of William and Dorothy Wordsworth were overwrought with singular felicity and entireness. Readers will long trace the signals of this friendship in his works the record of it in his nephew's memoir of him with pleased surprise, and dwell on its lessons with thoughtful gratitude. Dorothy, not quite two years younger than William, was gifted like him, fraught with a similar temper of patient tenderness, and bound up with him in the same bundle of life. How thoroughly she lived in him is betrayed, with a naive simplicity altogether charming, in her published notes of the tour they made in Scotland. His appreciation of her worth, and his affectionate sense of indebtedness to her, find many memorable utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,

The blessing of my later years Was with me when a boy. She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, And humble cares and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; And love and thought and joy.

They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until William's marriage; nor were they parted then.

This plot of orchard-ground is ours: My trees they are, my sister's flowers.

When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in hexameters, in which were these lines:

William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.

At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,

When every day brought with it some new sense Of exquisite regard for common things, And all the earth was budding with these gifts Of more refined humanity, thy breath, Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string, That went before my step.

She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:

Then it was, Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good, That the beloved sister, in whose sight Those days were passed,... Maintained for me a saving intercourse With my true self.

Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company. His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the "Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her. And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will, better than any magic spice or nard, perfume her memory, and keep it fresh as long as his own has name and breath to live among men.

Mine eyes did ne'er Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts, But either she, whom now I have, who now Divides with me that loved abode, was there, Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned, Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang. The thought of her was like a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath Or fragrance independent of the wind.

The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses, he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before, acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Shelley called

The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame Over his living head, like heaven, is bent— An early but enduring monument.

Perhaps his better traits nowhere shine out with such steady lustre as in the constancy of glowing tenderness with which, in all his wanderings, woes, and glory, he cherished the love of his sister Augusta, Mrs. Leigh. She remained unalterably attached to him through the dreadful storm of unpopularity which drove him out of England. With what convulsive gratitude he appreciated her fond fidelity, he has expressed with that passionate richness of power which no other could ever equal. Four of his most splendid poems were composed for her and addressed to her. In the one beginning, "When all around grew drear and dark," he says,

When fortune changed, and love fled far, And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast, Thou wert the solitary star Which rose, and set not to the last.

The wonderful verses commencing,

Though the day of my destiny's over, And the star of my fate hath declined, Thy soft heart refused to discover The faults which so many could find,

wring the very soul by their intensity of feeling condensed into language of such vigor and such melody.

From the wreck of the past, which hath perished, Thus much I at least may recall: It hath taught me that what I most cherished Deserved to be dearest of all. In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wide waste there still is a tree, And a bird in the solitude singing, Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

To her he sent one of the first presentation copies of "Childe Harold," with this inscription: "To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father's son and most affectionate brother." He wrote to her those expressions of love beginning,

The castled crag of Drachenfels Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine;

and ending,

Nor could on earth a spot be found To nature and to me so dear, Could thy dear eyes, In following mine, Still sweeten more These banks of Rhine,

expressions so transcendently fond and earnest in their beauty, that it is a thrilling luxury to linger on them, return to them, and repeat them over and over.

One of the finest and richest productions of his genius, both in thought and in passion, is the poem he wrote to her when he was living at Diodati, on the banks of Leman.

My sister, my sweet sister! if a name Dearer and purer were, it should be thine. Mountains and seas divide us; but I claim No tears, but tenderness to answer mine. Go where I will, to me thou art the same, A loved regret which I would not resign. There yet are two things in my destiny, A world to roam through, and a home with thee.

I feel almost, at times, as I have felt In happy childhood: trees and flowers and brooks, Which do remember me of where I dwelt Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books; Come as of yore upon me, and can melt My heart with recognition of their looks; And even, at moments, I could think I see Some living thing to love, but none like thee.

Oh that thou wert but with me! but I grow The fool of my own wishes, and forget The solitude which I have vaunted so Has lost its praise in this but one regret.

The last intelligible words of Byron were, "Augusta, Ada, my sister, my child."

It would be hard to find a friendship more deeply rooted, more inclusive of the lives of the parties, proof against terrible trials, full of quiet fondness and substantial devotion, than that of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The earliest written expression of this attachment occurs in a sonnet "To my Sister," composed by Charles in a lucid interval, when he was confined in the asylum at Hoxton for the six weeks of his single attack of insanity.

Thou to me didst ever show Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend An ear to the desponding love-sick lay, Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay But ill the mighty debt of love I owe, Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.

Mary was ten years older than Charles, and, as is shown well in Talfourd's "Final Memorials," loved him with an affection combining a mother's care, a sister's tenderness, and a friend's fervent sympathy. Nor did he, in return, fall short in any respect. He appreciated her devotion, pitied her sorrow, responded to her feelings, revered her worth, and ministered to her wants with a loving gentleness, a patient self-sacrifice, and an heroic fortitude, which, as we gaze on his image, make the halo of the saint and the crown of the martyr alternate with the wrinkles of his weaknesses and his mirth. In one of her periodical paroxysms of madness, Mary struck her mother dead with a knife. Charles was then twenty-two, full of hope and ambition, enthusiastically attached to Coleridge, and in love with a certain "fair-haired maid," named Anna, to whom he had written some verses. This fearful tragedy altered and sealed his fate. He felt it to be his duty to devote himself thenceforth to his unhappy sister. He abandoned every thought of marriage, gave up his dreams of fame, and turned to his holy charge, with a chastened but resolute soul. "She for whom he gave up all," De Vincy says, "in turn gave up all for him. And of the happiness, which for forty years or more he had, no hour seemed true that was not derived from her." He never thought his sacrifice of youth and love gave him any license for caprice towards her or exactions from her. He always wrote of her as his better self, his wiser self, a generous benefactress, of whom he was hardly worthy. "Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister is the most thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness." He was happy when she was well and with him. His great sorrow was to be obliged so often to part from her on the recurrences of her attacks. "To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand. It would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing I do from her. All my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me." Their hearts and lives were blended for forty years. Mary was unconscious at the time of her brother's death, and the blow was mercifully deadened in her gradual recovery. In her sunset walks she would invariably lead her friends towards the churchyard where Charles was laid. Their common friend Moxon paints the touching scene:

Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow, The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast. Her only mate is now the minstrel lark, Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed A sister's tears.

Eleven years later, this memorable friendship, so sacred to all who knew it, was consummated for earth, as a few reverential survivors entered the shadow of Edmonton Church, and, coming away, left Mary and Charles Lamb sleeping in the same grave.

The union of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn was something wonderful, like the wonderful genius of sensibility and music which endowed them both. Such pure, tender, and noble souls are made for each other. The more fervid and exacting bonds of marriage and parentage did not interfere with the profound sympathy in which they lived, both when together and when apart. They corresponded in music. Their emotions, too deep and strange to be conveyed in words, like articulate thoughts, they expressed in tones. Seating themselves at their instruments, they would for hours carry on an intercourse perfectly intelligible to each other, and more adequate and delicious than any vocal conversation. When Felix, at Naples, at Rome, or in London, sent to Fanny a letter composed in notes, she translated it first with her eyes, then with her piano. The most charming transcripts of these affectionate and musical souls were thus made in music. Sweeter or more divinely gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth. Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous region of life. For, when Fanny died in her German home, Felix, amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking of his soul, rushed to the piano, and poured out his anguish in an improvisation of wailing and mysterious strains, which held the assembly spell-bound and in tears. In a few days a letter reached him, announcing that his sister had died at that very hour. On receiving the tidings, he uttered a shriek, and the shock was so great as to burst a blood-vessel in his brain. Life had no charm potent enough to stanch and heal the cruel laceration left in his already failing frame by this sundering blow. The web of torn fibrils bled invisibly. He soon faded away, and followed his sister to a world of finer melody, fitted for natures like theirs.

One of the noblest and wisest of the American poets the pure, brave, and devout Whittier had a sister who was to him very much what Dorothy was to Wordsworth. Several of her poems are printed with his. They always lived together; they studied together, rambled together, had a large share of their whole consciousness together. After her death, sitting alone in his wintry cottage, he said to a friend who was visiting him, that, since she was gone, to whose faithful taste and judgment he had been wont to submit all he wrote, he could hardly tell of a new production whether it were good or poor. He also said that the sad measure of his love for her was the vacancy which her departure had left. He has paid her, in his "Snow-Bound," this tribute, which will draw readers as long as loving hearts are left in his land:

As one who held herself a part Of all she saw, and let her heart Gainst the household bosom lean, Upon the motley-braided mat Our youngest and our dearest sat, Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes, Now bathed within the fadeless green And holy peace of Paradise. Oh! looking from some heavenly hill, Or from the shade of saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago: The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where'er I went, With dark eyes full of love's content. The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills The air with sweetness; all the hills Stretch green to June's unclouded sky; But still I wait with ear and eye For something gone which should be nigh, A loss in all familiar things, In flower that blooms, and bird that sings. And yet, dear heart! remembering thee, Am I not richer than of old? Safe in thy immortality, What change can reach the wealth I hold? What chance can mar the pearl and gold Thy love hath left in trust with me? And while in life's late afternoon, Where cool and long the shadows grow, I walk to meet the night that soon Shall shape and shadow overflow, I cannot feel that thou art far, Since near at need the angels are; And when the sunset gates unbar, Shall I not see thee waiting stand, And, white against the evening star, The welcome of thy beckoning hand?

One more instance of intense friendship between a brother and a sister and it is one of the most interesting that history reveals to us shall close this list. Maurice de Guerin was born in Languedoc, in France, in the year 1811; and there also, in 1839, he died. Although snatched away at twenty-eight, his fascinating personality and genius left an indelible impression on all appreciative persons who had come in contact with him. His writings, few and unelaborate as they are, have won admiring praise from the judges whose verdict is fame. His sister Eugenie, six years older than himself, took the place of mother as well as that of sister to the orphan boy. He was not more extraordinary for winsomeness and talent than she was for combined power of intelligence, tenacity of affection, and religiousness of principle. They became ardent friends, in the most emphatic meaning of the term. Maurice went to Paris to try his fortune as a writer. Eugenie's yearning and anxious heart followed him in rapid letters. She tells him how they whom he has left all love him, encourages him with virtue and piety, adjures him to be true to his best self. She says to him, with the irresistible eloquence of the heart, "We see things with the same eyes: what you find beautiful, I find beautiful. God has made our souls of one piece." Maurice's replies were shorter and rarer. It is evident, the reader feels it with a pang of regret, that Eugenie was much less to Maurice than he was to her; and yet he loved her well. But man's love is usually poor compared with woman's; and he was in the throngs of Paris, she in the solitude of a country home. He fell away from his original purity and constancy, lost his religious faith for a season, and seemed almost to forget those who idolized him with such deep fondness. Was he not one of the charmers, who are so much to others, but to whom others are in return comparatively so little?

Falling ill, he revisited home, and by the stainless affections, unwearied attentions, and devout routine there, was restored in soul as well as in body. When, not long afterwards, he had fallen in love with a West-Indian lady, a beautiful Creole, Eugenie went to him in Paris, and devoted herself sedulously to promote the marriage. It was brought about, and she spent a happy six months with the wedded pair. After her return to Languedoc, we find her writing in her journal, "My Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart? to find that this marriage, which I hoped would keep us so much together, leaves us more asunder than ever? I have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of any thing else in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth gone, and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life, a great affection is a great happiness: the spirit comes to take refuge in it entirely. Oh, delight and joy, which will never be your sister's portion! Only in the direction of God shall I find an issue for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, and as it has the power of loving."

Two months after these pathetic words were written, Maurice died, of a rapid consumption, in his father's house, ministered to by his wife and sisters with infinite tenderness and agonizing despair. In the last moment, his sister says, "He glued his lips to a cross that his wife held out to him, then sank: we all fell to kissing him, and he to dying." The shock came upon Eugenie with crushing severity. Ever after, she was haunted by the memory of "his beloved, pale face," "his beautiful head." Long afterwards, she wrote, "The whole of to-day I see pass and repass before me that dear, pale face: that beautiful head assumes all its various aspects in my memory, smiling, eloquent, suffering, dying." "Poor, beloved soul," she says, "you have had hardly any happiness here below: your life has been so short, your repose so rare, O God! uphold me. How we have gazed at him and loved him and kissed him, his wife and we, his sisters; he lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were asleep! My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see each other again on earth?"

Five years previous to her brother's death, Eugenie had begun a journal, which she forwarded to him from time to time. After the funeral, she tried to continue this, addressing it still to him: "To Maurice dead, to Maurice in heaven. He was the pride and joy of my heart. Oh, how sweet a name, and how full of tenderness, is that of brother!" She persevered for five months, when it became too painful, and she abandoned it. From this time till death overtook her, in the year 1848, she seemed to have but one purpose; namely, to secure Maurice's fame by the publication of his literary remains. Poverty and various other obstacles baffled all her efforts. But, in 1858, M. Trebutien, a loving and faithful friend, edited and published, in a single volume, the "Journal and Letters of Maurice de Guerin;" and, five years later, he published, in a companion volume, the "Journal and Letters of Eugenie de Guerin." The striking original genius and worth of these volumes, and the enviable praise already awarded them, insure for their authors a beautiful and enduring fame together. As long as the words of this devoted sister shall win the attention of gentle readers, tears will spring into their eyes, and a throb of pitying love fill their hearts with pleasing pain. "My soul slips easily into thee, O soul of my brother!" "We were two eyes looking out of one forehead." "My thought was only a reflex of my brother's; so vivid when he was there, then changing into twilight, and now gone." "O beautiful past days of my youth, with Maurice, the king of my heart!" "I am on the horizon of death: he is below it. All that I can do is to strain my gaze into it."

FRIENDSHIPS OF WIVES AND HUSBANDS.

THE friendships between persons of opposite sex, thus far considered, spring up under the primary impulse of consanguinity, and embroider themselves around the fostering relations of natural duty. Based on affiliation of descent, organic community of circumstances, and mixture of experience, and sanctioned by the most authoritative seals of social opinion, they are, when not impoverished or poisoned by any evil interference, warm, precious, and sacred. The strongest preventives of their frequency and the commonest drawbacks from their power are the dullness which creeps over all emotions under the dominion of passive habit, and the tendency to look elsewhere for more vivid attachments, more exciting associations.

But there is another class of friendships, more important in influence, if not in number, having also the highest sanctions both of law and of custom, and marked by such peculiarities that they constitute a species by themselves. It consists of the friendships which grow up between husbands and wives, within the shielded enclosure of matrimony. The community of interests between those united in wedlock if they are married in truth as well as in form is the most intimate and entire that can exist.

Their unqualified surrender and blending of lives, unreserved confidence and conjunction of hearts, afford, on the one hand, the most hazardous, on the other hand, the most propitious, conditions for a perfect mutual reflection of souls with all their contents. Nowhere else has knowledge such free scope, have the inducements for esteem or contempt such unhampered range, as in this relation. The inmost secrets of the parties are always exposed to revelation or to betrayal. Hypocrisy and deception are reduced to the narrowest limits. Accordingly, both the most absolute antagonism and misery, and the most absolute sympathy and happiness, are known in the conjugal union. Milton puts in the mouth of Samson a fearful expression of the former:

To wear out miserable days, Intangled with a poisonous bosom snake.

Of the latter we have an affecting instance in the historic narrative of that Italian Countess del Verme, who, losing her husband after an elysian union for eight years, was so shocked on learning his death, that she threw herself on his body in a convulsion of grief which broke her heart, and she instantly died beside him.

Are the parties selfish, unfeeling, ungenuine? Every possible opportunity is afforded for the base and alien qualities to recognize each other, and clash or effervesce. Is one wise, aspiring, magnanimous? the other, foolish, vulgar, revengeful? The yoke, pulled contrary ways, must gall and irritate. Then the fellowship of husband and wife is like that of acid and alkali. But, if they are filled with consecrating tenderness, sweet patience, and earnest purposes, all possible motives urge them to adjust their characters and conduct to each other; to tune their intercourse by heavenly laws; to mingle their experience in one blessed current; to soothe, support, and beautify each other's being. Then there results a union, including every faculty, satisfying every want, unparalleled for its integrity and its blessedness. In such cases as this, it may truly be said, marriage is the queen of all friendships.

A beautiful example of such a union is unveiled, in the tribute paid to his wife, by Sir James Mackintosh. He says, "I found an intelligent companion and a tender friend, a prudent monitress, the most faithful of wives, and a mother as tender as children ever had the misfortune to lose. I met a woman, who, by tender management of my weaknesses, gradually corrected the most pertinacious of them. She became prudent from affection; and, though of the most generous nature, she was taught frugality and economy by her love for me. She gently reclaimed me from dissipation, propped my weak and irresolute nature, urged my indolence to all the exertion that has been useful and creditable to me, and was perpetually at hand to admonish my heedlessness or improvidence. In her solicitude for my interest, she never for a moment forgot my feelings or character. Even in her occasional resentment, for which I but too often gave her cause, (would to God I could recall those moments!) she had no sullenness or acrimony. Such was she whom I have lost, when her excellent natural sense was rapidly improving, after eight years' struggle and distress had bound us fast together and moulded our tempers to each other; when a knowledge of her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, and before age had deprived it of much of its original ardor."

It is to be presumed that those who enter into a relation with each other on which so much of their destiny is staked, take the step under the influence of love. And by love the love which looks to a conjugal union is to be understood a general movement of personal sympathy, imparting a special richness and intensity to the imagination in its action toward the individuals concerned, and thus giving each of them a genial and generous idea of the other to govern their mutual references; the whole operation being animated and emphasized, more or less prominently, by the impulse of sex. The idea of each other with which the wedded pair begin their union, an idea ennobled and vivified by imagination, and serving as the basis and stimulus of their love, may be largely made up of illusions, or may be sound, though inadequate. In the former case, one of three results will follow, either, as the poetic illusions are dispelled, and the fancied charms of the soul are replaced by barren poverty or haggard ugliness, the ardor of affection will be reversed by disappointment and friction into antipathy, engendering a chronic state, sometimes of fierce hatred, sometimes of sullen dislike; or that affection, robbed of its moral supports, admiration, gratitude, faith, and desire, will subside into a condition of spiritual tedium, unnoticing routine; or else, the imaginative element dying out, while the sexual element retains or perhaps even exaggerates its force, love will degenerate into lust. These three results depict the real union subsisting between three classes of husbands and wives, when the hymeneal glow has passed, and fixed realities assert their sway. The first is a hideous association of enemies, a yoked animosity; the second, a lukewarm connection of colleagues, an external partnership; the third, a convenient alliance of pleasure seekers, an animal cohabitation.

But that imaginative stir which lends such ardor and elevation to the honeymoon period is not always a fermentation of happy error. It is many times a fruition of beauty and good, resting on a perception of realities, growing greater, lovelier, more efficacious, with the growing powers and opportunities for appreciation. In these cases, where the divine bias which causes the newly wedded twain to put a beautiful interpretation on all the signs of each other's being depends not on illusion, but originates in truth, and where no fatal alloy or shock interferes to destroy it, the blessed affection in which they live together, instead of souring into aversion, stagnating into indifference, or sinking to a baser level than it began on, will naturally triumph over other changes, and grow more comprehensive and noble, as enlarged experiences disclose vaster grounds for justifying it, and furnish finer stimulants to feed it. In such instances, the beautifying tinges of romance, that streak and flush the horizon, neither fade into the grayness of fact, nor die into the darkness of neglect, but now broaden and deepen into the blue of meridian assurance, now clarify and ascend into the starlight of faith and mystery. The conditions that originally inspired the confiding and admiring sympathy become, with the lapse of time and the progress of acquaintance, more pronounced and more adequate, and insure a union ever fonder and more blunt. A husband and wife so united generally remain a pair of lovers, but sometimes become a pair of friends. Which of these two names is most descriptive of the union depends on the relative space held in it by the element of sense and sex. With some this ingredient is so important, that it infuses its quality into their very thoughts, and gives the distinctive character of love to their whole relation. With others this feature in the marriage fellowship becomes relatively less as the heyday of youth subsides, and the moral and mental bonds become more various and extensive. The physical tie, however vital, is insignificant in comparison with the entire web of their conscious ties. Love is included in their whole relation, as a rivulet threading a lake. This subordination of the stream to the lake is surest to take place with those in whom pure mind most predominates, whose spirit is least roiled by the perturbation of the senses. With such it is almost a necessity, when hate or indifference does not intervene, that love should refine into friendship. As the ferment of passion ceases, the lees settle, and a transparent sympathy appears, reflecting all heavenly and eternal things.

As an example of the transmutation of passion into sentiment, of impulse into principle, of feverish flame into calm fire, we may instance the Greek Pericles and Aspasia, who were friends even more than lovers, their intellectual companionship and common pursuit of culture being one of the precious traditions of humanity. Grote, whose learning, ability, and fairness give weight to his opinion, affirms his belief that the vile charges brought against Aspasia were the offspring of lying gossip and scandal. The estimate of her talents and accomplishments was so high that the authorship of the greatest speech ever delivered by Pericles was attributed to her. She is also particularly interesting to us as the first woman who kept an open parlor for the visits of chosen friends and the culture of conversation, as the earliest queen of the drawing room. Her house was the centre of the highest literary and philosophical society of Athens. Socrates himself was a constant visitor there. There too, as Plutarch asserts, many of the most distinguished Athenian matrons were wont to go with their husbands for the pleasure and profit of her conversation.

In Roman history we may point to Brutus and his heroic Portia, who was fully capable of entering into all his counsels, dangers, and hopes, and, when he fell, of dying as became the daughter of Cato. The characters of the noble and Arria were likewise in perfect accord, in their high strains of wisdom, valor, and virtue; and when the brutal emperor, Claudius, commanded the death of her husband, the wife, stabbing herself, handed him the dagger, with the immortal words, "Brutus, it does not hurt."

Seneca and his Paulina were bound together by community of tastes and acquirements, and unbroken happiness. He asks, "What can be sweeter than to be so dear to your wife that it makes you dearer to yourself?" When the tyrant ordered the philosopher to commit suicide, his wife insisted on opening her veins, and dying with him. After long resistance, he consented, saying, "I will not deprive you of the honor of so noble an example." But Nero would not allow her to die thus, and had her veins bound up; not, however, until she had lost so much blood that her blanched face, for the rest of her days, gave rise to the well known rhetorical comparison, "as pale as Seneca's Paulina."

Calpurnia, likewise, the wife of the younger Pliny, was identified with her husband in all his studies, ambitions, triumphs. She fashioned herself after his pattern, knew his works by heart, sang his verses, listened behind a screen to his public speeches, drinking in the applauses lavished on him. We may justly infer from the whale character of the "Letter of Consolation," which he wrote to her, on occasion of the death of their beloved daughter, Timoxena, that a relation similar to the one just mentioned subsisted between Plutarch and his wife.

By friendship in marriage is meant companionship of inner lives, community of aims and efforts, the lofty concord of aspiring minds. These are comparatively few, as made known to us in classic antiquity, owing to the jealous separation of the sexes in social life, that strict subjection of woman to man, which was characteristic of the ancient world. If we were thinking of wedded love instead of wedded friendship, it would be easy to cull a host of affecting and imposing instances: such as, the Hebrew Rebekah and Rachel; the Greek Alcestis; the Hindu Savitri; the Persian Pantheia; and a glorious crowd of Roman matrons, like Lucretia, who have left a renown as grand and deathless as the memory of Rome itself.

The modern examples of fortunate friendship in marriage are more numerous than the ancient ones. Two delightful instances, particularly worthy of study, have been so fully described by Mrs. Jameson as to make superfluous any thing more than a slight allusion here. The first of these pairs is the early English poet, William Habington, and his Castara. Habington collected and published, in two rich parts, the poems he wrote to Castara before and after his marriage, and added a preface full of choice thought and heartfelt emotion. By her husband's pen,

Castara's name Is writ as fair in the register of fame As the ancient beauties, which translated are, By poets, up to heaven, each there a star.

The illustrious Roman lawyer, Giambattista Zappi, and Faustina Maratti were the other pair alluded to, whose wedded love was crowned with a superior friendship. Zappi is celebrated for his sublime sonnet on the Moses of Michael Angelo. But the most of his verses were inspired by his wife, and dedicated to her. Her verses were almost exclusively inspired by her husband, and dedicated to him. Their works are published together in one volume.

Roland, the famous Girondist minister, a man of marked abilities and incorruptible integrity, married the gifted and high souled Jeanne Philippon a short time before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He was twenty two years her senior. Her love for him, founded on his philosophic spirit and antique virtues, was so ardent and so faithful that she has often been called "the Heloise of the eighteenth century." Their principles, their souls, their hopes, their toils and sufferings, were alike and inseparable. They hailed the early efforts of the Revolutionists as the dawn of a golden age for mankind. Madame Roland shared in the studies of her husband, aided him in his compositions, and served as his sole secretary during his two ministries. No intrigue of his party was unknown to her, or uninfluenced by her genius. Yet no falsehood or trickery debased, no meanness sullied her. "She was the angel of the cause she espoused, the soul of honor, and the conscience of all who embraced it." When Robespierre overthrew the Girondists, Roland, with others of his party, saved his life by a flight to Rouen. His wife was soon sentenced to death by the infamous Fouquier Tinville. She rode to the guillotine clad in white, her glossy black hair hanging down to her girdle, and embraced her fate with divine courage and dignity. Hearing the direful news, Roland walked a few miles out of Rouen, and deliberately killed himself with his cane sword. His body was found by the roadside, with a paper containing his last words: "Whoever thou art that findest these remains, respect them as those of a man who consecrated his life to usefullness, and who dies, as he has lived, honest and virtuous. Hearing of the death of my wife, I would not remain another day on this earth so stained with crimes."

All appreciative readers of the works and the life of Herder gratefully associate his Caroline with their recollections of him. Under the stress of his many sore trials, this great, vexed, struggling, sorrowing man would have succumbed to his afflictions, and entered the grave much earlier than he did, if it had not been for the solace and strength his wife gave him at home; and not a little of his present celebrity is due to the devoted energy of pride and affection with which she labored to have justice done to his writings and his memory.

A spotless and exalted pair of friends look out of English history at us, in the faces of John and Lucy Hutchinson. He was governor of Nottingham, and one of the judges of Charles I. In her widowhood, Lady Hutchinson drew that wonderful portrait of her husband which has been styled the most perfect piece of biography ever penned by a woman.

John Austin, under crushing burdens and amidst freezing neglect, wrought out the profoundest exposition of jurisprudence which exists in the English language. His wife, Sarah Austin, distinguished for her early importation and unveiling of German literature to the English mind, was every thing to him that a tender, wise, and strong friend could be. In the prefaces to her publications of his posthumous works, the discerning reader may trace, through the modest concealment, something of one of the purest, deepest, most steadfast of those friendships which adorn while they enrich the annals of human nature.

One shrinks from the indelicacy of alluding to persons still living, and yet can hardly help suggesting what a friendship there must have been in the union of such scholars, thinkers, poets, aspirants, as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But space would fail for a list of the royal friendships of this class revealed in literary records. And, for every example published, there must obviously be a multitude, quite as sweet and grand, which are hidden in purely private life.

Leopold Schefer, the serene and lofty author of the "Layman's Breviary," that charming work just published in our country in the fine translation of Charles T. Brooks, lost his wife in the twenty fifth year of their marriage. What a friend he had in her appears from the simple words, surcharged with feeling, in which he speaks of her. He writes, "Only a single unconquerable sorrow has smitten me in all my life, the death of the still soul with whom life, for the first time, was to me a life. Nor have I had any other troubles. People who make trouble for themselves, and in an unappeased spirit find an everlasting misery, may properly call me still a fortunate man. But, though outwardly as much grass should grow over her grave as ever can grow in long desolated days and nights, inwardly no grass grows over a real life annihilating grief. One gets re adjusted with the world; but, after all, he goes at last with an open wound into the grave. Believe me in this."

An example yet more recent has obtained such a monumental recognition, that mention of it is not here to be avoided. John Stuart Mill dedicates his imperishable "Essay on Liberty" to his deceased wife in these terms:

"To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings, the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward, I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work, as it stands, has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from any thing that I can write unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."

The conditions favoring the formation of a consummate friendship between husband and wife meet in fortunate combination in two classes of instances.

In the first, the sovereignty is the bond of a common nobleness; in the second, the bond of a common ambition. The united worship of truth, beauty, goodness, make, it is to be hoped, the most absolute friends of unnumbered wedded pairs. One adoring pursuit of excellence, one devout trust in God, one happy aiming at perfection, draws their noblest activities into unison, free from the impediments of selfishness and suspicion. Under the over arching sanctions of Divinity, knowing each other to be worthy and true, they confide in each other with the sympathy of a total esteem, based on a common devotion to the supreme prizes of the universe, whose reflected lustre already transfigures their spirits and sanctifies their persons in each other's eyes.

Many a husband and wife are also made friends, above all their mere love, by sharing in some earnest and condign social ambition. How many a man of genius has been chiefly indebted for his achievements to the wife who has sedulously identified herself with his success, ever at his side, unseen perhaps by the world, studying his art, lightening his tasks, soothing his pride, healing his hurts, stimulating his confidence, baffling his enemies, gaining him patrons or allies, assuaging his falls, refreshing his energy for new trials, and, when he has triumphed, and is applauded on his eminence, silently drinking in, as her reward, the popular admiration bestowed on him.

This intense co operation and struggle towards an outer goal, when unneutralized, produces that wondrous identification which is the type of complete friendship. A crowd of the most brilliant artists, authors, statesmen, might each point to his wife, and say, "To that bosom friend, to that guardian angel, to her quick intelligence, unfailing consolation, steady stimulus, I principally owe, under Heaven, what I am and what I have done." Many beautiful delineations of this fact have been given in fiction. The picture of Lord and Lady Davenant, in Miss Edgeworth's "Helen," is worthy of particular mention as a picture drawn to the life.

Nothing in fiction, however, is finer or more commanding, as an example of the true relation of the sexes, than is afforded in real life by the biography of Lord William and Lady Russell. Every such historic instance has a benign lesson for our time, in which, it is to be feared, many bad influences are working with fatal effect, temporarily at least, to lessen the attractions and undermine the sanctity of marriage, Guizot ends his beautiful and noble essay on the married life of Lord and Lady Russell with this impressive paragraph:

"I have felt profound pleasure in relating the history of this lady, so pure in her passion, always great and always humble in her greatness, devoted with equal ardor to her feelings and her duties in grief and joy, in triumph and adversity. Our times are attacked with a deplorable malady: men believe only in the passion which is attended with moral derangement. All ardent, exalted, and soul mastering sentiments appear to them impossible within the bounds of moral laws and social conventions. All order seems to them a paralyzing yoke, all submission a debasing servitude: no flame is any thing, if it is not a devouring conflagration. This disease is the graver because it is not the crisis of a fever nor the explosion of an exuberant force. It springs from perverse doctrines, from the rejection of law and faith, from the idolatry of man. And with this disease there is joined another no less lamentable: man not only adores nothing but himself, but even himself he adores only in the multitude where all men are confounded. He hates and envies every thing that rises above the vulgar level: all superiority, all individual grandeur, seems to him an iniquity, an injury towards that chaos of undistinguished and ephemeral beings whom he calls humanity. When we have been assailed by these base doctrines, and the shameful passions which give birth to or are born from them; when we have felt the hatefullness of them, and measured the peril, it is a lively delight to meet with one of those noble examples which are their splendid confutation. In proportion as I respect humanity in its totality, I admire and love those glorified images of humanity which personify and set on high, under visible features and with a proper name, whatever it has of most noble and most pure. Lady Russell gives the soul this beautiful and virtuous joy."

It is fitting, in the next place, to say something of the disappointment and wretchedness which so many married men and women notoriously experience in their relations with each other. It may be useful to state the principal causes of this unhappiness, and to give some definite directions in the way of remedy. Absence of love, absence of reason, absence of justice, absence of taste, in other words, harshness and neglect, silliness and frivolity, vice and crime, vulgarity and slovenliness, are the leading and inevitable creators of alienation, dislike, and misery in marriage. Whatever tends to increase these tends to multiply separations and divorces between those who cannot endure each other; and to multiply irritations, quarrels, sorrows, and agonies between those who may endure, but cannot enjoy, each other. In marriage, the intimacy is so great and constant that the slightest friction easily becomes galling. Nowhere beside is there such need of magnanimous forbearance in one, or else of equality of worth and refinement in both. "Love does not secure happiness in marriage, often the contrary: reason is necessary." So said the wise Jean Paul. He also said, "The best man joined with the worst woman has a greater hell than the best woman joined with the worst man." This is, no doubt, true as a general rule, because woman is so much more capable than man of self abnegation, silent patience, meek submission, and flexible adjustment to inevitable circumstances. Probably the women who keenly and chronically suffer from unhappy marriages are far more numerous than the kindred sufferers of the other sex. This is because they are more deeply susceptible to cruelty and indifference and to all the repulsive traits of character; are less capable of ignoring such things; have less of absorbing occupation of their own to take up their attention, and are less able to be absorbed in things beyond the personal and domestic sphere. There are unquestionably thousands of married women whose experience is made a living martyrdom by the infidelity, the tyranny, the coarseness, the general odiousness and wearisomeness of their husbands. In most cases, even where a divorce is wished, the shocking public scandal and disgrace are too much; and they wear on to the end. What misery delicate and conscientious women, of dedicated souls and polished manners, who love every thing that is pure and beautiful, are compelled to undergo in their bondage to husbands, ignorant, uninteresting, ignoble, relentlessly domineering, is not to be expressed. Their best weapons in such cases, if they knew it, are gentleness, patience, persuasion, and the skilful use of every means to improve and uplift their unequal companions to their own level. The Persian poet expressed a rich truth when he wrote, "Gentleness is the sail on the table of morals." It is a tragedy that the good wife of a bad husband is so identified with him, that the penalties of his offences fall on her head, often more terribly than on his. A pure woman loving a wicked man must expect to have her affections ravaged by his sins: does not the lightning drawn by the rod blast the innocent ivy entwining it? What lacerating woes the gambler, the drunkard, the forger, the adulterer, inflicts on his wife!

And yet, profound as is the misfortune, sharp as is the suffering of such, it may be doubted whether a noble, sensitive, cultivated man, with a yearning heart of softness and peace, a capacious mind full of grand aspirations, married, by some fatal chance, to a woman with a petty soul, a teasing and tyrannical temper, a mendacious and rasping tongue, whose taste is for small gossip and scandal, whose ambition is for fashionable show and noise, whose life is one incessant fret and sting, it may be doubted if this man's lot is not severer with his ill matched consort than hers would be with the worst husband in the world. He had better marry a vinegar cruet than such a Tartar. When weary and seeking to rest, to be roused up by a scolding; when searching for truth, or contemplating beauty, or communing with God, or aspiring to perfection, or scheming some vast good for mankind, to be aggravated by abuse, insulted by false charges, dragged down to petty interests which he despises, and mixed up with wrongs and passions which he loathes, these degrading injuries, these wasteful vexations, are what he must endure. No wonder if he vehemently resents a treatment so incongruous with his worth. No wonder if, vexed, hurt, goaded half to madness, he gets enraged, and unseemly contentions ensue, followed by painful depression and remorseful grief. No wonder if he finds it hard indeed to forget or to forgive the infliction of an evil so incomparably profound and frightful. There is, to a high smiled man, no wrong more hurtful or more difficult to pardon than to have mean motives falsely ascribed to him, to be placed by misinterpretation on a lower plane than that where he belongs. Every such experience stabs the moral source of life, and draws blood from the soul itself. Husband and wife powerfully tend to a common level and likeness. The higher must redeem and lift the unequal mate, or live in strife and misery. If the lower takes pattern after the superior one, the petty, frivolous, false, and fretful becoming magnanimous, dedicated, truthful, and serene, it is a divine triumph of grace, and the result will be full of blessedness. But otherwise a wearing unhappiness is inevitable, however carefully it be hidden, however bravely it be borne. George Sand says very strikingly of Rousseau and Therese Levasseur, "His true fault was in persevering in his attachment for that vulgar woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean Jacques Rousseau, one does not acquire the faults of littleness, does not lose his native grandeur; but he feels his genius troubled, combated, worried, distempered, and he makes a pure loss of immense efforts to surmount miseries unworthy of him."

Let a husband be the true and pure guardian of his family, laboring always to adorn himself with the godlike gems of wisdom, virtue, and honor; let him bear himself in relation to his wife with gracious kindness towards her faults, with grateful recognition of her merits, with steady sympathy for her trials, with hearty aid for her better aspirations, and she must be of a vile stock, if she does not revere him, and minister unto him with all the graces and sweetness of her nature.

Let a wife, in her whole intercourse with her husband, try the efficacy of gentleness, purity, sincerity, scrupulous truth, meek and patient forbearance, an invariable tone and manner of deference, and, if he is not a brute, he cannot help respecting her and treating her kindly; and in nearly all instances he will end by loving her and living happily with her.

But if he is vulgar and vicious, despotic, reckless, so as to have no devotion for the august prizes and incorruptible pleasures of existence; if she is an unappeasable termagant, or a petty worrier, so taken up with trifling annoyances, that, wherever she looks, "the blue rotunda of the universe shrinks into a housewifery room;" if the presence of each acts as a morbid irritant on the nerves of the other, to the destruction of comfort, and the lowering of self respect, and the draining away of peace and strength, their companionship must infallibly be a companionship in wretchedness and loss.

The banes of domestic life are littleness, falsity, vulgarity, harshness, scolding vociferation, an incessant issuing of superfluous prohibitions and orders, which are regarded as impertinent interferences with the general liberty and repose, and are provocative of rankling or exploding resentments. The blessed antidotes that sweeten and enrich domestic life are refinement, high aims, great interests, soft voices, quiet and gentle manners, magnanimous tempers, forbearance from all unnecessary commands or dictation, and generous allowances of mutual freedom. Love makes obedience lighter than liberty. Man wears a noble allegiance, not as a collar, but as a garland. The Graces are never so lovely as when seen waiting on the Virtues; and, where they thus dwell together, they make a heavenly home.

No affection, save friendship, has any sure eternity in it. Friendship ought, therefore, always to be cultivated in love itself, as its only certain guard and preservative, not less than as the only sufficing substitute in its absence. A couple joined by love without friendship, walk on gunpowder with torches in their hands. Shall I venture to depict the sad decay which love naturally suffers, and the redemptive transformation which it sometimes undergoes? I will do it by translating a truthful and eloquent passage from Chateaubriand:

"At first our letters are long, vivid, frequent. The day is not capacious enough for them. We write at sunset; at moonrise we trace a few more lines, charging its chaste and silent light to hide our thousand desires. We watch for the first peep of dawn, to write what we believe we had forgotten to say in the delicious hours of our meeting. A thousand vows cover the paper, where all the roses of aurora are reflected; a thousand kisses are planted on the words, which seem born from the first glance of the sun. Not an idea, an image, a reverie, an accident, a disquietude, which has not its letter. Lo! one morning, something almost imperceptible steals on the beauty of this passion, like the first wrinkle on the front of an adored woman. The breath and perfume of love expire in these pages of youth, as an evening breeze dies upon the flowers. We feel it, but are unwilling to confess it. Our letters become shorter and fewer, are filled with news, with descriptions, with foreign matters; and, if any thing happens to delay them, we are less disturbed. On the subject of loving and being loved, we have grown reasonable. We submit to absence without complaint. Our former vows prolong themselves: here are still the same words; but they are dead. Soul is wanting in them. I love you is merely an expression of habit, a necessary form, the I have the honor to be of the love letter. Little by little the style freezes where it inflamed. The post day, no longer eagerly anticipated, is rather dreaded; writing has become a fatigue. We blush to think of the madnesses we have trusted to paper, and wish we could recall our letters and burn them. What has happened? Is it a new attachment which begins where an old one ends? No: it is love dying in advance of the object loved. We are forced to own that the sentiments of man are subjected to the effects of a hidden process: the fever of time, which produces lassitude, also dissipates illusion, undermines our passions, withers our loves, and changes our hearts even as it changes our locks and our years. There is but one exception to this human infirmity. There sometimes occurs in a strong soul a love firm enough to transform itself into impassioned friendship, so as to become a duty, and appropriate the qualities of virtue. Then, neutralizing the weakness of nature, it acquires the immortality of a principle."

Before leaving this part of the theme, it may not be out of place to express the belief, a belief founded on no hurried inference from a narrow survey of history, or from a superficial study of the data in the breast, that the greatest number of examples of the most impassioned, absorbing, and lasting affection between the sexes have occurred within the ties of marriage, and not outside of those ties. More than other kindred relations, these rest on the nourishing basis of public law and social honor, as well as of personal esteem and avowed identification of interests. Whatever necessitates secrecy, or compromises the fullness and frankness of self respect, even if it give piquancy and fire, takes away moral health, steady integrity; and inserts an insidious element, either of devouring fever or of slow decay. Other things being equal, affection, wedded under every legal and moral sanction, reaches the highest climax and is the most complete and enduring. Every failure implies some defect in the conditions. The readiness, in general, of illicit love to admit a substitute, its facility of consolation and forgetfullness when any fatal calamity has removed its object, demonstrates both its lower origin and its baser nature. In a well consorted marriage, the soul, the mind, esteem and faith, the pure strain of friendship, enter more largely. The grave is not the boundary of its functions. After death, the love is cherished in the ideal fife of the mind as vividly as ever, and with an added sanctity. Widowed memory clings to the disconsolate happiness of sitting by the fountain of oblivion, and drawing up the sunken treasure. If, as Statius said, to love the living be a pleasant indulgence, to love the dead is a religious duty:

Vivam amare, voluptas; defunctam, religio.

A multitude of nameless husbands and wives have experienced this truth in their bereavement; their love not decaying, but passing into resurrection. The Hindus have a fine parable of Kamadeva, the eastern Cupid. He shot Siva, who, turning on him in rage, reduced the mischievous archer to ashes. All the gods wept over his ashes. Then he arose in spiritual form, free from every physical trait or quality. Literature, both eastern and western, ancient and modern, gives us many instances of conjugal love outliving death, and, in holy tenderness of dedication, pleasing itself with all kinds of ideal restorations and celebrations of its object.

When Mausolus, king of Curia, died, his widow, Queen Artemisia, seemed thenceforth almost wholly absorbed in the memory of him. She built to him, at Halicarnassus, that magnificent monument, or mausoleum, which was known as one of the seven wonders of the world, and which became the generic name for all superb sepulchres. She employed the most renowned rhetors of the age to immortalize the glory of her husband, by writing and reciting his praises. At the consecration of the wondrous fabric which she had reared in his honor, she offered a prize for the most eloquent eulogy on Mausolus. All the orators of Greece were invited to the contest. Theopompus bore off the prize. It is said, that, during the two years by which she survived her royal spouse, she daily mixed some of his ashes with her drink, so that, ere their spirits met in Hades, her body was the tomb of his. Unquestionably there is something greatly overstrained in this; but the whole story is one of the most signal instances, handed down from the past, of an intense wedded affection triumphant over death, and crowning itself with death.

Still more costly honors than Artemisia lavished on her Mausolus, did the Great Mogul, Shah Jehan, grandson of Akhar and father of Aurungzebe, pay to his idolized wife, Moomtaza Mahul. She died, in 1631, in giving birth to a daughter. Shah Jehan's love for this exquisite being appears to have been supreme and irreplaceable. In her last moments, she made two requests: one, that he would build an imposing tomb for her; the other, that he would never marry again. He assented to both requests, and kept his word. His reign was the culminating period of the prosperity, power, and pomp of the empire. The gorgeousness of his state beggars description; but those terrible British, destined to overshadow and destroy it, were already beginning to get a foothold in India. Little, however, did the imperial mourner, Shah Jehan, heed them.

He at once set his architects at work, with twenty thousand laborers, to build over his lost Moomtaza a memorial worthy of her loveliness and of his grief. For twenty two years they toiled, when, at a cost equivalent to twenty million dollars now, unveiled from every disfiguring accompaniment, rose on the banks of the clear blue Jumna, at Agra, where it still stands to enchant the soul of every traveller who approaches, the Taj Mahul, the most exquisite building on the globe, an angelic dream of beauty, materialized, and translated to earth. It is a romance, at once of oriental royalty, of marriage, and of the human heart, that the unrivalled pearl of architecture in all the world should thus be a tomb reared over the body of his wife by the proudest monarch of the East.

Colonel Sleeman says, "Of no building on earth had I heard so much as of this; for over five and twenty years, I had been looking forward to the sight of it. And, from the first glimpse of the dome and minarets on the distant horizon, to the last glance back from my tent ropes to the magnificent gateway, I can truly say that every thing surpassed my expectations. After going repeatedly over every part, and examining the total view, from every position and in all possible lights, from that of full moon at midnight in a cloudless sky, to that of the noonday sun, the mind reposes in the calm persuasion, that there is an entire harmony of parts, a faultless congregation of architectural beauties, on which it could dwell for ever without fatigue; and one leaves it with a feeling of regret that he cannot have it all his life within his reach, and of assurance that the image of what he has seen can never be obliterated from his mind while memory holds her seat."

The quadrangle in which the structure stands is 964 feet one way, 329 the other. The area around is laid out in parterres, planted with flowers, blossoming shrubs, and cypresses, interlaced by rows of bubbling fountains, and avenues paved with freestone slabs. The mausoleum itself, the terrace, and the minarets, are all formed of the finest white marble, and thickly inlaid with precious stones. The funeral vault is a miracle of coolness, softness, splendor, tenderness, and solemnity. Fergusson, the historian of architecture, says, "No words can express the chastened beauty of that central chamber, the most graceful and the most impressive of all the sepulchres of the world." When, in that vault, before the two sarcophagi containing the bodies of Moomtaza and Shah Jehan, the priest reads the Koran in a sort of mournful chant, or an attendant plays with subdued breathings on a flute, the notes are borne up into the numerous arcades and domes, reduplicated, intermingled, dying away, fainter and fainter, sweeter and sweeter, until the ravished hearer, as he departs, can remember no more than that the sounds were heavenly, and produced a heavenly effect, making him feel, that, if to die were to listen for ever to those tones, death would be inconceivable bliss.

Russell, in his "Diary in India," thus records the impression the scene made on him: "Write a description of the Taj! As well write a description of that lovely dream which flushed the poet's cheek, or gently moved the painter's hand, as he lay trembling with delight, the Endymion of the glorious Art Goddess, who reveals herself and then floats softly away among the moonbeams and the dew clouds, as he springs up to grasp the melting form! Here is a dream in marble, the Taj: solid, permanent; but who, with pen or pencil, can convey to him who has not seen it the exquisite delight with which the structure imbues the mind at the first glance, the proportions and the beauty of this strange loveliness, which rises in the Indian waste, as some tall palm springs by the fountain in a barren wilderness? It is wrong to call it a dream in marble: it is a thought, an idea, a conception of tenderness, a sigh of eternal devotion and love, caught and imbued with earthly immortality. There it stands in its astonishing perfection, rising from a lofty platform of marble of dazzling whiteness, minarets, dome, portals, all shining like a fresh, crisp snow wreath. The proportions of the whole are so full of grace and feeling, that the mind rests quite contented with the general impression, ere it gives a thought to the details of the building, the exquisite screens of marble in the windows, the fretted porches, the arched doorways, from which a shower of fleecy marble, mingled with a rain of gems, seems about to fall on you; the solid walls melting and glowing with tendrils of bright flowers and wreaths of blood stone, agate, jasper, carnelian, amethyst, snatched, as it were, from the garden outside, and pressed into the snowy blocks. Enter by the doorway in front: the arched roof of the cupola soars above you, and the light falls dimly on the shrine like tombs in the centre of the glistening marble, see a winter palace, in whose glacial walls some gentle hand has buried the last flowers of autumn." In yon cenotaph, profusely covered with ornamental texts from the Koran, sleeps the lamented bride of the Indies. "Her lord lies beside her, in a less costly but loftier casket; and the two tombs are enclosed by a lattice of white marble, which is cut and carved as though it were of the softest substance in the world. A light burns in the tombs, and garlands of flowers are laid over the rich imitations of themselves. Hark as you whisper gently, there rolls through the obscure vault overhead a murmur like that of the sea on a pebbly beach in summer. A white bearded priest, who never raises his eyes from his book as we pass, suddenly reads out a verse from the Koran. Hark! How an invisible choir takes it up, till the reverberated echoes swell into a full volume of sound, as though some congregation of the skies were chanting their hymns above our heads. The eye fills and the lip quivers, we know not why: a sigh and a tear are the tribute which every heart that can be moved to pity, or has thrilled with love, must pay to the builder of the Taj."

Who that reads this tender romance of love and loss, pride and grief and peerless memorial, will not sometimes amidst enchanted recollections of Nala and Damayanti, Haroun Al Raschid and Zobeide, Shahriar and Scheherazade in his recurring thoughts allow a place for the imperfectly known but fascinating story of Shah Jehan and Moomtaza Mahul?

PLATONIC LOVE; OR, THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS.

IN the further consideration of these genial attachments of women with persons not of their own sex, we come to those whose relation is that of a wholly free and elective friendship, a friendship with no intermixture either of hereditary connections or of family obligations. This brings us directly to an examination of that species of affection celebrated through the world as Platonic love; on which so many false judgments, inadequate judgments, coarse judgments, have been pronounced by partial observers and critics. If, in this discussion of the relations of affection between men and women, delicate topics are handled, and some things said from which a squeamish reader may shrink, the vital importance of the matter and the motive of the treatment furnish the only needful apology. Prudery is the parsimony of a shrivelled heart, and is scarcely worthy of respect. The subject of the relations of sentiment and passion between the sexes has paramount claims on our attention. It actually occupies a foremost place in the thoughts of most persons. It is constantly handled in the most unrestrained banter on the stage and in all the provinces of fictitious literature. Almost every sensational tale reeks with vulgar portrayals of it. In the mean time, the reign of vice is thought daily to grow more common and more shameless; the demoralization of our great cities, in the flaunting openness of their profligacy, seems to be annually bringing them nearer to an equality with the debauched cities of pagan antiquity. The depravity of an abandoned life is supposed to gather constantly an enlarging class of victims, and to diffuse its undermining evils more widely around us. Shall the pulpit, the academic chair, the high court of the finer literature, alone be dumb? It is the duty of those clothed with the authority of wisdom and purity to speak in plain accents of warning and guidance. They are guilty of a wrong, if they let a mock modesty keep them silent on a matter so deeply imperilling the most sacred interests of the community.