O love!-when womanhood is in the flush,

And man's a young and an unspotted thing,
His first-breathed word, and her half-conscious blush,
Are fair as light in heaven, or flowers in spring.*

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

O how this spring of love resembleth

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

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

Allan Cunningham.

↑ Shakespeare.

When the stupor and the agony of that bereavement had passed away, the very intensity of Leonard's affection became a source of consolation. Margaret had been to him a purely ideal object during the years of his youth; death had again rendered her such. Imagination had beautified and idolized her then; faith sanctified and glorified her now. She had been to him on earth all that he had fancied, all that he had hoped, all that he had desired. She would again be so in heaven. And this second union nothing could impede, nothing could interrupt, nothing could dissolve. He had only to keep himself worthy of it by cherishing her memory, hallowing his heart to it while he performed a parent's duty to their child; and so doing to await his own summons, which must one day come, which every day was brought nearer, and which any day might bring. 'Tis the only discipline we are born for;

All studies else are but as circular lines,

And death the centre where they must all incet.*

The same feeling which from his childhood had refined Leonard's heart, keeping it pure and undefiled, had also corroborated the natural strength of his character, and made him firm of purpose. It was a saying of Bishop Andrewes, that "good husbandry is good divinity"; "the truth whereof," says Fuller, "no wise man will deny." Frugality he had always practised as a needful virtue, and found that, in an especial manner, it brings with it its own reward. He now resolved upon scrupulously setting apart a fourth of his small income to make a provision for his child, in case of her surviving him, as in the natural course of things might be expected. If she should be removed before him - for this was an event the possibility of which he always bore in mind he had resolved, that whatever should have been accumulated with this intent, should be disposed of to some

* Massinger.

other pious purpose, for such, within the limits to which his poor means extended, he properly considered this. And having entered on this prudential course with a calm reliance upon Providence, in case his hour should come before that purpose could be accomplished, he was without any earthly hope or fear, those alone excepted from which no parent can be free.

The child had been christened Deborah, after her maternal grandmother, for whom Leonard ever gratefully retained a most affectionate and reverential remembrance. She was a healthy, happy creature in body and in mind; at first

one of those little prating girls

Of whom fond parents tell such tedious stories;

afterwards, as she grew up, a favorite with the village schoolmistress, and with the whole parish; docile, goodnatured, lively and yet considerate, always gay as a lark and busy as a bee. One of the pensive pleasures in which Leonard indulged was to gaze on her unperceived, and trace the likeness to her mother.

O Christ!

How that which was the life's life of our being,
Can pass away, and we recall it thus !†

That resemblance which was strong in childhood lessened as the child grew up; for Margaret's countenance had acquired a cast of meek melancholy during those years in which the bread of bitterness had been her portion; and, when hope came to her, it was that "hope deferred,' which takes from the cheek its bloom, even when the heart, instead of being made sick, is sustained by it. But no unhappy circumstances depressed the constitutional buoyancy of her daughter's spirits. Deborah brought into the world the

* Dryden.

† Isaac Comnenus.

happiest of all nature's endowments, an easy temper and a light heart. Resemblant therefore as the features were, the dissimilitude of expression was more apparent; and when Leonard contrasted in thought the sunshine of hilarity that lit up his daughter's face, with the sort of moonlight loveliness which had given a serene and saint-like character to her mother's, he wished to persuade himself, that as the early translation of the one seemed to have been thus prefigured, the other might be destined to live for he happiness of others till a good old age, while length of years in their course should ripen her for heaven.

CHAPTER VI.

OBSERVATIONS WHICH SHOW, THAT WHATEVER PRIDE MEN MAY TAKE IN THE APPELLATIONS THEY ACQUIRE IN THEIR PROGRESS THROUGH THE WORLD, THEIR DEAREST NAME DIES BEFORE THEM.

Thus they who reach

Gray hairs, die piecemeal. — SOUTHEY.

THE name of Leonard must now be dropped as we proceed. Some of the South American tribes, among whom the Jesuits labored with such exemplary zeal, and who take their personal appellations (as most names were originally derived) from beasts, birds, plants, and other visible objects, abolish upon the death of every individual the name by which he was called, and invent another for the thing from which it was taken, so that their language, owing to this curiously inconvenient custom, is in a state of continual change. An abolition almost as complete with regard to the person had taken place in the present instance. The name, Leonard, was consecrated to him by all his dearest and fondest recollections. He had been known by it on

his mother's knees, and in the humble cottage of that aunt who had been to him a second mother; and by the wife of his bosom, his first, last, and only love. Margaret had never spoken to him, never thought of him, by any other name. From the hour of her death, no human voice ever addressed him by it again. He never heard himself so called, except in dreams. It existed only in the dead letter; he signed it mechanically in the course of business, but it had ceased to be a living name.

Men willingly prefix a handle to their names, and tack on to them any two or more honorary letters of the alphabe; as a tail; they drop their surnames for a dignity, and change them for an estate or a title. They are pleased to be Doctor'd and Professor'd; to be Captain'd, Major'd, Colonel'd, General'd, or Admiral'd; to be Sir John'd, myLorded, or your-Grace'd. "You and I," says Cranmer in his Answer to Gardiner's book upon Transubstantiation — "you and I were delivered from our surnames when we were consecrated Bishops; sithence which time we have so commonly been used of all men to be called Bishops, you of Winchester, and I of Canterbury, that the most part of the people know not that your name is Gardiner, and mine Cranmer. And I pray God, that we being called to the name of Lords, have not forgotten our own baser estates, that once we were simple squires!" But the emotion with which the most successful suitor of Fortune hears himself first addressed by a new and honorable title, conferred upon him for his public deserts, touches his heart less (if that heart be sound at the core), than when after long absence, some one who is privileged so to use it, accosts him by his christian name, that household name which he has never heard but from his nearest relations, and his old familiar friends. By this it is that we are known to all around us in childhood; it is used only by our parents and our nearest kin when that stage is passed; and, as they drop off, it dies as to its oral uses with them.