sufficient to this sentiment to a high place amongst those that are most influential in their operations upon the human mind i appeal to the young or rather to the old who have not forgotten their youth whether love has not at some period of their existence given a life and to the aspect of creation a music to sound and an intensity to au their of simple and natural delight which while the enchantment lasted seemed to raise the pleasures of earth above sphere though in remembrance it claims nothing but a passing smile or perhaps a faint sigh of regret that we have lost so much of what the life of our early existence we smile because we have lived to awake from our delusion � to know that the sunshine which then appeared to us a flood of radiance pouring its golden streams over hill and grove and the principle of happiness through an the secret mysteries of nature was but the ordinary light of day liable to be obscured by mists and hid from us by the of dense gloomy clouds we smile because the brook that murmured at our feet with such continuous and unbroken melody to our young pure and clear and vivid like the secret springs of feeling since then has wearied us with the constant monotony of its sound seeming to tell of little else pebbles and clear water we smile because the song of at least half the birds whose voices were then all music has into a mere but most of all we smile because that bright being whose brow was with a glory � at whose feet we would have laid the accumulated treasures of the whole world had we possessed them � the idol whom we had placed upon the high altar of the soul has stepped down from that exalted and passing forth into the world endowed with the customary functions of humanity has mixed in the common of life and become an eating drinking bargain man or if after such a perchance we sigh it is not so much with any positive regret as with a vague sense of some indefinite loss � a mere illusion � a false colouring � a tone � an charm which owed its existence to the of the mind and yet we sigh because not the longest period of man s natural life not the rapid and entire success of all our schemes not the riches of prosperity poured into our lap around our feet and even beyond the circle of our hopes can restore what is lost to us when we are driven to the conviction that we can love no more it was an idle we tell ourselves in after life and we join in the ridicule that this foolish passion but would we not give all that time and tears have purchased for us to sit again in the bright sunshine to look round upon the fields and the woods to listen to the singing of the birds and without the excitement of art or the aid of borrowed attributes to feel each individual moment sufficient in its fulness of felicity to lull the memory of the past and soothe down the anxieties of the future into one point of present time all that we spend years in search of and without purchase and without sacrifice in one single isolated of experience the happiness for which countless are in vain it is a strong proof of the poetical character of love that all the contempt and all the ridicule it meets with in the world are unable to deprive it of the legitimate place which it holds in the popular works of our best authors is the only novel that occurs to me in which the interest of the story is in no way connected with love the author has supplied this deficiency by conducting the reader through his pages with an intensity of anxiety scarcely equalled elsewhere but well as this story is we arrive in the end at the unsatisfactory conviction that we have been reading an hard bad book the whole tenor of which is in direct opposition to the good providence of it may be remarked in the poetry op life with the same fact that sir walter scott after he had spell bound the public by the easy natural flow of his first poems tried his skill upon the battle of and produced one which it is difficult to read though the same master hand is there e has since for this want of to the tender passion by the most delicate and judicious distribution of it through the whole of his novels where we find enough and what is saying a great deal for the writer never too much at the same time however that love forms an essential part in our popular works of fiction it seems to be with the genius of the english nation to make it the entire or even the leading any particular work approaches the nearest to this extreme but his novels are more remarkable in this day for presenting minute descriptions of human character of the social habits and customs of the times in which he lived than as upon love miss porter kind as she is in all her characters and marching them off the stage in couples gives us battles innumerable with lively of patriotism and various other passions good and evil among which her love scenes form a very small and certainly a very inferior part and miss the great who love with more tact and often with exquisite pathos it always with due to that substantial sound moral which to the honour of her sex and the benefit of her fellow creatures she makes the chief object of her clear well regulated and comprehensive mind we have no work in our language which bears any resemblance to the sorrows of 