The weekly register. [volume] (Point Pleasant, Va. [W. Va.]) 1862-1909, 1905-03-08
WERE NOT Welded WERE.
THESE LOVERS.
skstehs. of Noted People Whose
Loves Failed.

Loves Ea1lcQ.
IT may be some consolation tc
the rejected lover to remember:
says the Chicago Tribune. thai
many of the greatest men in the
history have suffered equal pangs
and survived the same ordeal to
find married happiness elsewhere.
When Abraham Lincoln, as a
youth of 18 was ssliving in a rude
log cabin in Spence county, In
diana, and picking up the rudi-
ments of education in the inter-
walls of rail splitting and plow-
ing,p he fell in love with the
daughter of a poor Irish settler
in neighboring log cabin, and
afteEmany eIumsg failures to de-
clare his love to her IN person
penned with difficulty one of his
first letters asking her to become
his wife.
He never received an answer
to this "clumsy effusion," as he
afterward called it, but when
he met Bridget .sshe tossed her
head and looked another way.
She was much too good, she is
said to have declared, to marry
a gawky farm hand" Then it
was that Lincoln left the, pater-
nal cabin and voyaged, as hired
hand on ffatboat, into the
greater world which before long
was destined to ring with the
name of the gawky farm boy.
When, 80 years orsso later, Abra-
ham Lincoln became President
Bridget was still living, "the
slatternly wife of farm laborer
in a log cabin" and still preserv-
ed the ill-penned letter which
might, if she had been wise, have
made her 1.-The first lady in the
land
Even Byron, that most beauti-
full and gifted of men, had more
than his share ofrefusals, and one
of them at least wasaccompanied |
by words which left sting to |
his last day. He was only al
Harrow school-boy of 16 when
he fell madly in love with Miss
Chaworth of Annesley, yenng
heiress of some beauty, who was
two years older than himself.
But Miss Chaworth treated all
the boys shy advances with
laughter and contempt and, al
though he was @suffering the
tortures of the LOST for her sake,
refused to take him seriously.
But the crowning blow came
when, from an adjacent room, he
overheard Miss Chaworth say to
her maid: "Do you think 1
could care anything for that lame
boy?" s:This cruel speech" he
afterward said, "was like a shot
through my heart. Although it
was late aud pitch dark, I darted
out of the house and never
stopped running until 1 reached
Newstead."
Even Byron's future unhappy
wife rejected him decisively
when first he asked her hand,
and only after long resistance
consented to receive letters from
him.
Shelley, too, almost as hand
some and as gifted as Byron,
knew, from more than one ex-
perience, the pangs of rejection"
After he had been expelled from
Oxford and went to London
with his fellow culprit, Hogg,
to live, he fell violently in love
with his landlady's daughter,
who bore the unromantic name
OF Eliza Jenkins; but Eliza, even
though he threatened to commit
snicide in his despair, refused to
have anything to do with him,
and when few months later,
having thought better of the
suicidal threat, he sought to con-
sole himself by paying court to
Miss Harriet Grove, a pretty
cousin, she was SO alarmed at
his heterodoxies that she sent
him decisively about his bust
ness.
When Richard Brinsley sheri-
dan, following the example OF