CHAPTER XXVIII.

"To veer how vain! on, onward strain,

Brave barks! in light, in darkness too;
Through winds and tides one compass guides,
To that, and your own selves, be true.

But, O blithe breeze! and O great seas,
Though ne'er that earliest parting past
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last.

One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold where'er they fare.

O bounding breeze, O rushing seas!

At last, at last unite them there!"-Clough.

E will not separate us, we have been so happy " -these were the last words of Charlotte Brontë when, having become Mrs. Nicholls, and having lived with her husband only nine months, death came to snatch the cup of domestic felicity from the lips of the happy pair. A low wandering delirium came on. Wakening for an instant from this stupor, she saw her

husband's woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her. "Oh!" she whispered, "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy."

Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, when a girl, loved her family so dearly that she used to wish that when they had to die, two large walls might press towards each other, and crush them all, that they might die all together, and be spared the misery of parting. Loving husbands and wives will sympathize with this wish, for they must sometimes look forward with dread to the misery of parting from each other.

"To know, to esteem, to love—and then to part,
Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!"

In all ages the anticipation and the reality of separation has been the greatest and sometimes the only sorrow in the lot of united couples. Many very touching inscriptions have been found in the Catacombs at Rome, but none more touching than those which record this separation. Here is one of them. It is in memory of a very young wife, who must have been married when little more than a child (fourteen), and then left by her husband, a soldier, called off probably to serve in the provinces. He returns to finds his poor little wife dead. Was she martyred, or did she fret herself to death, or was she carried off with malaria in the Catacombs? We know nothing; but here is her epitaph full of simple pathos, and warm as with the very life blood: "To Domina, 375 A.D., my sweetest and most innocent wife, who lived sixteen years and four months, and was married two years, with whom

I was not able to live more than six months, during which time I showed her my love as I felt it; none else so loved each other." When Sir Albert Morton died, his wife's grief was such that she shortly followed him, and was laid by his side. Wotton's two lines on the event have been celebrated as containing a volume in seventeen words:

"He first deceased; she for a little tried

To live without him, liked it not, and died."

When Colonel Hutchinson, the noble Commonwealth officer, felt himself dying, knowing the deep sorrow which his death would occasion to his wife, he left this message, which was conveyed to her: "Let her, as she is above other women, show herself on this occasion a good Christian, and above the pitch of ordinary women." Faithful to his injunction, instead of lamenting his loss, she indulged her sorrow in depicting her husband as he had lived. "They who dote on mortal excellences," she says, in her Introduction to the "Life," " when, by the inevitable fate of all things frail, their adored idols are taken from them, may let loose the winds of passion to bring in a flood of sorrow, whose ebbing tides carry away the dear memory of what they have lost; and when comfort is essayed to such mourners, commonly all objects are removed out of their view which may with their remembrance renew the grief; and in time these remedies succeed, and oblivion's curtain is by degrees drawn over the dead face; and things less lovely are liked, while they are not viewed together with that which was most excellent. But I, that am under a command not to grieve

at the common rate of desolate women, while I am studying which way to moderate my woe, and if it were possible to augment my love, I can for the present find out none more just to your dear father, nor consolatory to myself, than the preservation of his memory, which I need not gild with such flattering commendations as hired preachers do equally give to the truly and titularly honourable. A naked undressed narrative, speaking the simple truth of him, will deck him with more substantial glory than all the panegyrics the best pens could ever concentrate to the virtues of the best men."

When death removed Stella from Swift, and he was left alone to think of what he had lost, he described her as "the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend, that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with." Henceforward he must strive and suffer alone. The tenderness, of which his attachment to Stella had been the strongest symptom, deeply as it had struck its roots into his nature, withered into cynicism. But a lock of Stella's hair is said to have been found in Swift's desk, when his own fight was ended, and on the paper in which it was wrapped were written. words that have become proverbial for the burden of pathos that their forced brevity seems to hide—“ Only a woman's hair." It is for each reader to read his own meaning into them.

Dr. Johnson's wife was querulous, exacting, old, and the reverse of beautiful, and yet a considerable time after her death he said that ever since the sad event he seemed to himself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wild of life, without any direction or fixed

point of view: a gloomy gazer on the world to which he had little relation. After recording some good resolution in his Journal he was in the habit since her death of writing after it his wife's name-" Tetty." It is only a word; but how eloquent it is! When a certain Mr. Edwards asked him if he had ever known what it was to have a wife, Johnson replied: "Sir, I have known what it was to have a wife, and (in a solemn, tender, faltering tone) I have known what it was to lose a wife. I had almost broke my heart." Nor did he allow himself to forget this experience. To New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Day, and his own birthday, which he set apart as sacred days dedicated to solemn thought and high communion with his own soul, he added the day of his wife's death.

Nor are such separations less felt in humble life. A year or two ago the newspapers in describing a colliery accident related that upon the tin water-bottle of one of the dead men brought out of the Seaham Pit, there was scratched, evidently with a nail, the following letter to his wife: "DEAR MARGARET,-There was forty of us altogether at 7 A.M., some was singing hymns, but my thought was on my little Michael. I thought that him and I would meet in heaven at the same time. Oh, dear wife, God save you and the children, and pray for myself. Dear wife, farewell. My last thoughts are about you and the children. Be sure and learn the children to pray for me. Oh, what a terrible position we are in.-MICHAEL SMITH, 54, Henry Street." The little Michael he refers to was his child whom he had left at home ill. The lad died on the day of the explosion.