Page images
PDF
EPUB

might; while she lived there was no lack of attention on my part to her comfort, yet I felt relieved when she was dead; relieved from the necessity of daily playing a part, and at liberty to make expiation to Isabel P. I felt that if I had sinned, I had also repented; that if I had erred, I could also expiate that error. And I sought an interview with Isabel. I threw myself at her feet, I prayed for pardon, for acceptance, but all in vain. I was rejected from the impulse of a high nature, and a spirit wounded by my former conduct, touched to the very quick. I was rejected, but I loved her more from the very nobleness of her pride. And so I came here again to feel as I have felt before in this fierce combatting of opinions and strivings for place, that the play is not worth the candie,' and that an honest man should not mingle with politicians. And now you have heard all my history, you know why I wished those papers sent among my friends. It may be possible that when Isabel knows that I have been sick and my life in danger, she may remember her former affection and relent; she may even forgive me yet. I shall write to her to-morrow if I am able; I will lay my whole heart open to her; I will appeal to her generosity, to her piety. I may be forgiven-accepted--and then life to me would wear a new aspect."

I approved of my friend's determination, and sent the papers to the office duly sealed and directed. The next day a letter from Mr. followed as he had said, these same papers and a few, very few days after, when my friend sick of hope deferred, had retreated to "Champagne and a Chicken at last," trying to forget over these the miseries of his condition, an answer came which drove the delighted receiver to the very heights of ecstacy. Isabel true to the instinct of her woman's nature, could but forgive and promise to receive the despondent lover who remembered her on what might have been his dying bed, and he could but hurry his preparations and go home as he might best reach there in the delightful chaos of his ideas. And I cannot but remark it as a strange oversight that I saw none among the numerous letters he received of condolence for his illness and congratulation on his recovery from grave and weighty men, which he even attempted to answer at this critical juneture of his affairs. From that time to the day of his departure, I heard no more complaints that "life was weary, stale, flat, or unprofitable," on the contrary he seemed to breathe an atmosphere of enjoyment. And when I received a letter from him before his marriage with Isabel, I perceived that it was written with exuberant spirits and that in the plenitude of his good nature, my friend had even remembered the little reporter and sent a handsome gratuity for his use, which was the more necessary as a consoler to the poor man, as he had had his nose recently pulled, so report said, for the scurrilous insinuations contained in his former paragraph against my friend's doughty antagonist, Mr.

And so I complied with my friend's request and went on to his marriage, but of this I shall give no description, for it was like all marriages, though the result of it was so far unlike many others, that it produced unfeigned happiness.

It was many years after this event, that as I read the evening papers, I noticed among the arrivals at Washington, that of my distinguished friend, Mr.- accompanied by his still lovely and accomplished wife, so the phrase went, "and his beautiful daughters;" and when after reading this paragraph I wiped my spectacles and replaced them in their case, a strange desire to see him again flashed across my mind, and I went on accordingly. And glad and cheering was our meeting once more, and in the handsome and middleaged gentleman before me I could hardly recognise the ardent and restless features of the wearied politician of my former and earlier acquaintance. And when discoursing with him on the earlier passages of his history I found the same difference in his feelings and opinions. Now he was honored, admired, followed; but his talents and virtues deserved his brilliant reputation, his heart was at ease, and his happiness was at home.

We were thus one evening discussing the past, and while gazing on the happy circle around him, I quietly asked him if he had grown more consistent than of yore, or if he would accept the challenge of an adversary?

[ocr errors]

Ah, no," my friend exclaimed, looking on the placid features of his wife and children, “I am too old for that now, and I should refuse on the selfish principle that to one blest as I am, life is sweet."

White Roses.

BY THE LATE MRS. L. P. SMITH.

THEY were gathered for a bridal'
I knew it by their hue;
Fair as the summer moonlight

Upon the sleeping dew.
From their fair and fairy sisters

They were borne without a sigh, For one remembered evening

To blossom and to die. They were gathered for a bridal! And fastened in a wreath; But purer were the roses Than the heart that lay beneath; Yet the beaming eye was lovely, And the coral lip was fair, And the gazer looked and asked not For the secret hidden there. They were gathered for a bridal!

L. H.

Where a thousand torches glistened, When the holy words were spoken, And the false and faithless listened And answered to the vow Which another heart had taken, Yet he was present there

The once loved, the forsaken. They were gathered for a bridal!

And now how they are dying, And young Love at the altar

Of broken faith is sighing. Their summer's life was stainless, And not like her's who wore them; They are faded, and the farewell Of beauty lingers o'er them!

Wedded Life.

benefit of such moments, the injured but forgiving

I may perhaps, startle you, Emma, by saying wife must still be enshrined in the purity of forthat the first year of a young woman's wedded mer times. The husband will excuse his fault to life is generally the most unhappy, and the most himself, and in some measure also stand exonetrying one she experiences. However we may rated to the world, if his wife relax in the proprihave studied the character of our affianced, how-ety of her conduct-while on the contrary the ever we may imagine we knew it in all its narrow windings, still shall we find, when we become wives, that we have something to learn. By actions are the affections on either side shown, and although it is in the power and nature of a woman to manifest her devotedness and tenderness by a thousand little attentions, she must not repine if

she receive not the like.

The feelings of the other sex are not so soft and exquisite as those of our own own, if they were we might possibly be happier, and we may for a moment wish that they were so; but we shall restrain so selfish a desire, if we reflect how much more unfit they would be with such a constitution to bear the crosses and buffets of the world: and we shall rejoice that they do not possess our keener sensibilities and content with our lot, refusing to increase at their expense, a happiness, which, if not quite meeting our ideas of perfection, does so sufficiently to make us blest.

It is said that Lover's quarrels are but the renewal of love, but it is not so in truth. Continued differences and bickerings will undermine the strongest affection, and a wife cannot be too careful to avoid disputes upon the most trivial subjects; indeed, it is the every day occurrences which try the love and tempers in the married life-great occasions for quarrels seldom occur. Every wish, every prejudice must meet with attention, and the first thought of a woman should be the pleasing and providing for her husband.

It is impossible to enumerate all the little incidents which annoy married men, or the little unobtrusive pleasures which it is in the power of a wife to give; but throughout her life, in her employments and in her amusements, she must ever bear his pleasures in her mind. She must act for him in preference to herself, and she will be amply rewarded by witnessing his delight in her and his home. To a woman who loves her husband with all the devotedness of her nature, this will be a pleasure, not a task; and to make him happy, she will never grudge any sacrifice of self.

The greatest misery a woman can experience is the changed heart and alienated affections of her husband; but even in that painful case she must not relax in the performance of her duties. She must not upbraid-she must bear with forti tude and patience her great disappointment; she must return good for evil to the utmost, and her consolation will be the consciousness that her trials have not their rise or continuance in any dereliction of affection or duty on her part.

Some women in order to win back a husband's wandering love, have recourse to attempts to arouse his jealousy-but they are much mistaken in pursuing such a method. A man however debased his conduct, never entirely forgets the love he once bore to the pride of his youth; there are moments when feelings of tenderness for her will return with force to his heart, and to reap the

gentle forbearance, the uncomplaining patience, and unobtrusive rectitude of the woman he injures, will deeply strike his heart and do much to win back his former love, and to the observance of the vows he breathed at the altar, when his heart was devoted to the being from whom it has wandered. A kind look an affectionate expression half uttered, must bring his wife to his side, and she must, with smiles and tenderness, encourage the returning affection carefully avoiding all reference to her sufferings, or the cause of them.

This will not be difficult for a virtuous woman to perform. Our love, which before marriage is constrained by the modesty natural to our sex, increases in fervency and depth afterwards,-enables us to bear unfelt the world's scorn,-all is swallowed up in it. An affectionate wife clings to her husband through poverty and riches; and the more the world recedes from him, his friend when none others come near him;-she will be his comforter when all other worldly comfort has slid from him. Her devotedness will be his rock when he has no other support ;-she will smile at the frowns of the world: she will not heed its censures-he is her all, and in love are all other feelings forgotten or absorbed. No sacrifice will be too great-the faintest smiles will not be a reward too little; quick at feeling tenderness,—and a very trifling circumstance is sufficient to awaken or to still the pain of our hearts, and bring us misery or happiness.-Mrs. Stanford.

I Know a Flower.

I KNOW a flower that blooms alone,
Where angry thorns and briers spring;
And e'en when Summer's smiles come on,
'Tis but a choked and blighted thing.
That flower is earthly Hope, which twines
Its tendrils round the human breast,
"Till worn with Grief that hope declines,
And leaves the mourner all unblest.

I know a stream that rippling flows

Beneath the varied light of day; Which bears the pleasures and the woes Of thousands who will pass away. That stream is Time's eventful tide,

Whose fitful gushings soon are o'er, And we shall seek its pebbly side,

And rest beside its waves no more.

But there's a light which none may stay,
That points us to the port of Peace,
Which kindly lights our troubled way,
And bids our rankling sorrows cease.
That light is Hope beyond the grave;
We grasp it with our latest breath,
And find, though lone and dim, 'twill save
And soothe us in the hour of death.

THE CHEROKEE'S THREAT.

A SKETCH.

THERE were a hundred students in the new class matriculated at Yale College, in Connecticut, in the year, 18-. They were young men of different ages and of all conditions in life, but less various in their mien and breeding than in the characteristics of the widely-separated states from which they came. It is not thought extraordinary in Europe that the French and English, the German and the Italian, should possess distinct national traits yet one American is supposed to be like every other, though the two between whom the comparison is drawn were born and bred as far apart, and in as different latitudes as the Highland cateran and the brigand of Calabria.

I looked around me with some interest, when, on the first morning of the term, the president, professors, and students of the university assembled in the college chapel at the sound of the prayerbell, and, with my brother Freshmen, I stood in the side aisle, closing up with our motley and, as yet, unclassical heads and habiliments, the long files of the more initiated classes. The berrybrown tan of the sun of Georgia, unblanched by study, was still dark and deep upon the cheek of one: the look of command breathing through the indolent attitude betrayed in another, the young Carolinian and slave-master; a coat of green, garnished with fur and bright buttons, and shaped less by the tailor than by the Herculean and expansive frame over which it was strained, had a taste of Kentucky in its complexion; the white skin and red or sandy hair, cold expression, stiff black coat, and serious attention to the service, told of the Puritan son of New Hampshire or Vermont; and, perked up in his well-fitted coat, the exquisite of the class, stood the slight and metropolitan New-Yorker, with a firm belief in his tailor and himself written on his effeminate lip, and an occasional look at his neighbor's coats and shoulders, that might have been construed into wonder upon what western river or mountain dwelt the builders of such coats and men?

conclusion, that whatever might be Mr. "S.'s" capacity for friendship, his ill-will would be very demonstrative and uncomfortable.

The term went on, the politics of the little republic fermented, and as first appearances wore away, or peculiarities wore of by collision or developed by intimacy, the different members of the class rose or fell in the general estimation, and the graduation of talent and spirit became more just and definite. The "Southerners and Northeners," as they are called, soon discovered, like the classes that had gone before them, that they had no qualities in common, and of the secret societies which exist among students in that university, joined each that of their own compatriots. The Caroli nian or Georgian, who had passed his life on a plantation secluded from the society of his equals, soon found out the value of his chivalrous deportment and graceful indolence in the gay society for which the town is remarkable; while the Vermontese, or White-Mountaineer, "made unfashionably," and ill at ease upon a carpet, took another line of ambition, and sat down with the advantage of constitutional perseverance to the study which he would find in the end a "better continuer," even in the race for a lady's favor.

It was the only republic I have ever knownthat class of Freshmen. It was a fair arena; and neither in politics, nor society, nor literature, nor love, nor religion, have I, in much searching through the world, found the same fair play or good feeling. Talk of our own republic!—its society is the very core and gall of the worst growth of aristocracy. Talk of the republic of letters!—the two groves by the pyramid of Caius Cestius laugh it to scorn. Of love!—of religion! What is bought and sold like that which has the name of the first? What is made a snare and tool by the designing like the last? But here-with a government over us kindly and paternal, no favor shown, and no privilege denied,-every quality in the competitors at all possible—age, previous educaRather annoyed at last by the glances of one or tion, and, above all, worldly position,—it was an two of the seniors, who were amusing themselves arena in which a generous spirit would wrestle with my simple gaze of curiosity, I turned my at- with an abandon of heart and limb he might never tention to my more immediate neighborhood. A know in the world again. Every individual rising youth with close, curling, brown hair, rather un- or falling by the estimation he exacts of his felder-sized, but with a certain decision and nerve in lows, there is no such school of honor. Each, of his lip which struck me immediately, and which the many palms of scholarship, from the severest seemed to express somehow a confidence in him to the lightest, aiming at that which best suits his self which his limbs scarce bore out, stood with genius, and as welcome as another to the goal, his back to the pulpit, and with his foot on the there is no apology for the laggard. Of the feelseat, and his elbow on his knee, seemed to have ings that stir the heart in our youth-of the few, the fallen at once into the habit of the place, and to be very few, which have no recoil, and leave no rebeyond surprise or interest. As it was the custom pentance-this leaping from the starting-post of of the college to take places at prayers and recita-mind-this first spread of the encouraged wing in tion alphabetically, and he was likely to be my the free heaven of thought and knowledge-is neighbor in chapel and in hall for the next four recorded in my own slender experience as the most years, I speculated rather more than I should else have done on his face and manner; and as the president came to his Amen, I came to the

joyous and the most unmingled. He who has soiled his bright honor with the tools of political ambition,-he who has leant his soul upon the

charity of a sect in religion,—he who has loved, | more luxuriously furnished than I had expected hoped, and trusted in the greater arena of life and from the simplicity of his appearance, but his manhood,-must look back on days like these as books, not many, but select, and (what is in the broken-winged eagle to the sky-as the In-America an expensive luxury) in the best English dian's subdued horse to the prairie.

II.

editions and superbly bound, excited most my envy and surprise. How he should have acquired tastes of such ultra-civilization in the forests of the west was a mystery that remained to be solved.

[ocr errors]

New Haven is not alone the seat of a university. It is a kind of metropolis of education. The excessive beauty of the town, with its embowered streets and sunny gardens, the refinement of its At the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt society, its central position and accessibility, and of the fashionable suburb of New Haven stood a the facilities for attending the lectures of the Col- rambling old Dutch house, built probably when lege professors, render it a most desirable place of the cattle of Mynheer grazed over the present site instruction in every department. Among others, of the town. It was a wilderness of irregular the female schools of the place have a great repu-rooms, of no describable shape in its exterior, and tation, and this, which in Europe, or with a Euro- from its southern balcony, to use an expression pean state of society, would probably be an evil, Gallicism, "gave upon the bay." Long Island is, from the simple and frank character of manners Sound, the great highway from the North Atlantic in America, a mutual and decided advantage. to New-York, weltered in alternate lead and silver The daughters of the first families of the country (oftener like the brighter metal, for the climate is are sent here, committed for two, three or four divine,) between the curving lip of the bay and years, to the exclusive care of the head of the es- the interminable and sandy shore of the island, tablishment, and (as one of the privileged ad- some six leagues distant, the procession of ships vantages of the school) associating freely with the and steamers stole past with an imperceptible progeneral society of the town, the male part, of gress the ceaseless bells of the college chapel course, composed principally of students. A more came deadened through the trees behind, and (the easy and liberal intercourse exists in no society in day being one of golden autumn, and myself and the world, and in no society that I have ever seen St. John waiting while black Agatha answered is the tone of morals and manners so high and un-the door bell) the sun-steeped precipice of East exceptionable. Attachments are often formed, and Rock, with its tiara of blood-red maples flashing little harm is thought of it; and unless it is a very like a Turk's banner in the light, drew from us strong case of depravity or objection, no obstacle both a truant wish for a ramble and a holiday. I is thrown in the way of common intercourse be-shall have more to say anon of the foliage of an tween lovers; and the lady returns to her family, American October, but just now, while I rememand the gentleman senior disappears with his ber it, I wish to record a belief of my own, that if, degree, and they meet and marry-if they like. If as philosophy supposes, we have lived other lives, they do not, the lady stands as well in the matri--if monial market as ever, and the gentleman (unlike his horse) is not damaged by having been on his knees.

"our star

Hath had else where its setting,
And cometh from afar,"

Like "Le Noir Faineant," at the tournament, my friend St. John seemed more a looker-on than it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am an actor in the various pursuits of the university. remembering and describing-profoundly serene, A sudden interference in a quarrel in which a sunny as the top of Olympus, heavenly, pure, brother freshman was contending against odds holy, and more invigorating and intoxicating than enlightened the class as to his spirit and personal luxurious or balmy;—the sort of air that the visitstrength; he acquitted himself at recitations withing angels might have brought with them to the the air of self-contempt for such easy excellence; he dressed plainly, but with instinctive taste; and at the end of the first term, having shrunk from all intimacy, and lived alone with his books and a kind of trapper's dog he had brought with him from the west, he had acquired an ascendency in the opinion of the class for which no one could account, but to which every one unhesitatingly assented.

tent of Abraham-it is on such days, I would record, that my own memory steps back over the dim threshold of life (so it seems to me)—and on such days only. It is worth the translation of our youth and our household gods to a sunnier land, if it were alone for these immortal revelations.

In a few minutes from this time were assembled in Mrs. Ilfrington's drawing-room the six or seven young ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her pupils, of whom one was a new comer, and the object of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the one day of the week when morning visitors were admitted, and I was there,

We returned after our first short vacation, and of my hundred class-mates there was but one whom I much cared to meet again. St. John had passed the vacation in his rooms, and my evident pleasure at meeting him, for the first time, seem-in compliance with an unexpected request from ed to open his heart to me. He invited me to my friend, to present him to the agreeable circle breakfast with him. By favor seldom granted to of Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitue in her family, a freshman, he had a lodging in the town-the this excellent lady had taken occasion to introduce rest of the class being compelled to live with a chum to me, a week or two before, the new comer of in the college buildings. I found his rooms-(I whom I have spoken above, a departure from the was the first of the class who had entered them) ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to

aristocracy of England!-ye are five women I have seen in as many years' wandering over the world, lived to gaze upon, and live to remember and adore-a constellation, I almost believe, that has absorbed all the intensest light of the beauty of a hemisphere-yet, with your pictures colored to life in my memory, and the pride of rank and state thrown over most of you like an elevating charm, I go back to the school of Mrs. Ilfrington, and (smile if you will!) they were as lovely, and stately, and as worthy of the worship of the world.

be a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, | realm of sunshine and passion! Pale and transa tacit claim to mix myself up in that young lady's parent princess-pearl of the court of Florencedestiny as deeply as I should find agreeable. The than whom the creations on the immortal walls of the new comer was the daughter of an Indian chief, Pitti less discipline our eye for the shapes of heaand her name was Nunu. ven! Gipsy of Pactolus! Jewess of the ThraciThe wrongs of civilization to the noble abori-an Gallipolis! Bright and gifted cynosure of the gines of America are a subject of much poetical feeling in the United States, and will ultimately become the poetry of the nation. At present the sentiment takes occasionally a tangible shape, and the transmission of the daughter of a Cherokee chief to New Haven, to be educated at the expense of the government, and of several young men of the same high birth to different colleges, will be recorded among the evidences in history that we did not plough the bones of their fathers into our fields without some feeling of compunction. Nunu liad come to the sea-board under the charge of a female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one of the native schools of the West, and was destined, though a chief's daughter, to return as a teacher to her tribe when she should have mastered some of the higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an apt scholar, but her settled melancholy when away from her books had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try the effect of a little society upon her, and hence my privilege to ask for her appearance in the drawing-room.

As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sunshine of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want of interest, and the manner of course, with which St. John had received my animated description of the personal beauty of the Cherokee. "I have hunted with the tribe," was his only answer, "and know their features."

"But she is not like them," I replied, with a tone of some impatience; "she is the beau ideal of a red-skin, but it is with the softened features of an Arab or an Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and has no higher cheek-bones than the plaster Venus in your chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in her eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose of her attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra. I tell you she is divine."

I introduced St. John to the young ladies as they came in. Having never seen him except in the presence of men, I was a little curious to know whether his singular aplomb would serve him as well with the other sex, of which I was aware he had a very slender experience. My attention was distracted at the moment of mentioning his name to a lovely little Georgian (with eyes full of the liquid sunshine of the south,) by a sudden bark of joy from the dog, who had been left in the hall; and as the door opened, and the slight and graceful Indian girl entered the room, the usually unsocial animal sprang bounding in, lavishing caresses on her, and seemingly wild with the delight of a recognition.

In the confusion of taking the dog from the room. I had again lost the moment of remarking St. John's manner, and on the entrance of Mrs. Ilfrington, Nunu was sitting calmly by the piano, and my friend was talking in a quiet undertone with the passionate Georgian.

"I must apoligise for my dog," said St. John, bowing gracefully to the mistress of the house; "he was bred by Indians, and the sight of a Cherokee reminded him of happier days—as it did his master."

Nunu turned her eyes quickly upon him, but St. John called to his dog, and we turned along immediately resumed her apparently deep study the green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfring-of the abtruse figures in the Kidderminster carpet. ton's house in view, and so opens a new chapter in my story.

IV.

"You are well arrived, young gentlemen," said Mrs. Ilfrington, "we press you into our service for a botanical ramble. Mr. Slingsby is at leisure, and will be delighted, I am sure. Shall I say as much for you Mr. St. John?"

St. John bowed, and the ladies left the room for their bonnets, Mrs. Ilfrington last. The door was scarcely closed when Nunu re-appeared, and checking herself with a sudden feeling at the first step over the threshold, stood gazing at St. John, evidently under very powerful emotion.

"

In the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael, steeped in their colors seem to have been in the divinest age of Venetian and Roman female beauty, I have scarce found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were assembled during my Sophomore year under the roof of Mrs. Ilfrington. They went about in their evening walks, graceful and angelic, but like the virgin pearls of the sea, they poured the light of their loveliness on the vegetating oysters about them, and no diver of fashion had yet taught She sprang upon his bosom with the bound of a them their value. Ignorant myself in those days leveret, and between her fast kisses broke the enof the scale of beauty, their features are enamel- dearing epithets of her native tongue, in words led in my memory, and I have tried insensibly by that I only understood by their passionate and that standard (and found wanting) of every court thrilling accent. The language of the heart is uniin Europe the dames most worshipped and highest versal.

born. Queen of the Sicilies, loveliest in your

Nunu!" he said, smiling slowly and unwillingly, and holding out his hand with the air of one who forgives an offence.

The fair scholars came in one after another,

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »