you will be happy-love, and all the beauties of the earth will be opened to your enjoyment.

"Love refines

The thoughts, the heart enlarges; hath his seat
In reason, and is judicious; is the scale

By which to heavenly love thou mayst ascend."

Love is a flame which burns purely in heaven, and the reflection of its light extends to earth; by its power, two lives are bestowed upon you— two worlds lie open to your view. It is by love you redouble your being; and as perfect love is perfect happiness, so, by its influence, the neares approach is made to the attributes of Deity.

"If love be holy, if that mystery

Of co-united hearts be sacrament;

If the unbounded Goodness have infused
A sacred ardour of a mutual love

Into our species; if those amorous joys,

Those sweets of life, those comforts even in death,
Spring from a cause above our reason's reach;
If that clear flame deduce its heat from Heaven,
"Tis, like its cause, eternal; always one,
As is th' instiller of divinest love,

Unchanged by time, immortal, maugre death.”

And though chained by matter to this lower orb, the unfettered spirit thus animated can soar on the wings of imagination to those bright lands where grief and pain cannot enter—a land far too bright and beautiful for mortal eye to gaze on,

where, in thought, we can hold sweet converse with the departed loved one, who even now may be bending over the object of its earthly affectiona guardian spirit in the hour of temptation, sorrow, or affliction.

It is this feeling which takes from Death his sting; and if religion forbids our rushing to his embrace, love compels us to allow that his reign of terrors is at an end, and, in place of being feared as a tyrant and destroyer, he is hailed as a deliverer and a friend. How beautiful and applicable to this state of mind are the following lines of Moore!-lines in which the poet seems to breathe out the feelings of his own soul, and immortalise them in song:

"Is it not sweet to think hereafter,
When the spirit leaves this sphere,
Love, with deathless wing, shall waft her
To those she long has mourn'd for here?

Hearts, from which 'twas death to sever,-
Eyes, this world can ne'er restore,—

There, as warm, as bright as ever,
Shall meet us, and be lost no more.

When wearily we wander, asking

Of earth and heaven, where are they,
Beneath whose smile we once lay basking,
Blest, and thinking bliss would stay?

Hope still lifts her radiant finger,
Pointing to the eternal home,
Upon whose portal yet they linger,
Looking back for us to come.

Alas! alas! doth hope deceive us?
Shall friendship-love-shall all those ties,
That bind a moment, and then leave us,
Be found again where nothing dies?

Oh! if no other boon were given,

To keep our hearts from wrong and stain, Who would not strive to win a heaven Where all we love shall meet again?"

CHAPTER II

WHAT IS LOVE?

WHAT thing is Love, which nought can countervail ?
Nought save itself, even such a thing is Love.
And worldly wealth in worth as far doth fail,
As lowest earth doth yield to heaven above.
Divine is Love, and scorneth worldly pelf,
And can be bought with nothing but with self.

SIR W. RALEIGH.

LOVE is like the glass

That throws its own rich colour over all,
And makes all beautiful. The morning looks
Its very loveliest when the fresh air

Has tinged the cheek we love with its glad red;
And the hot noon flits by most rapidly

When dearest eyes gaze with us on the page
Bearing the poet's words of love; and then

The twilight walk when the link'd arms can feel
The beating of the heart; upon the air
There is a music never heard but once,-
A light the eyes can never see again;
Each star has its own prophecy of hope,
And every song and tale that breathe of love
Seem echoes of the heart.

LANDON.