years! I do not think that I ever missed going to the Meeting twice every Sunday during that time; and I am certain that I never once laid my head upon my pillow without crying myself to sleep,-I knew not why, unless it was that it would be "so long" before I should see her again. I knew not why, then; but I know too well now. It was that I was all along treating my love as it was not made to be treated, and consequently as it will not bear to be treated. I was fancying it a star placed in the heavens above me, and was acting towards it accordingly; whereas, it was a flower, growing on the face of the earth like myself, and waiting to be plucked and placed in my bosom. I was fearful of touching it, lest a touch should kill it; and in the mean time it was dying of itself, for lack of the cherishing warmth that a touch might have communicated to it. I was regarding it as an immortal essence, and feeding it on ambrosia, while it was starving for want of the substantial "corn, wine, and oil," which is, in fact, its natural and appointed food. I cannot too often reiterate this truth upon the reader, because herein is included the sole end and intent of these Confessions-the only moral that is likely to be extracted from them. I repeat, then, that my grand mistake all through life has been wilfully to adopt a notion as to the nature, tendency, and utility of love, which turns out to have been directly opposed to the true one. I fancied I was acquainted with all the intricacies of this most intricate of all branches of knowledge, before I had learnt the simplest rule of its arithmetic, namely, that one and one, if properly added together, do not make two, but ONE. I proceed to relate the remarkable circumstance which brought me acquainted with the name of my mistress; and the reader is to bear in mind that I relate it as a fact, the truth of which I solemnly avouch. I pretend not to account for it, but only to tell it. I have said that for twelve months I never inquired the name of that being in whom my being seemed to be involved. I used to dream of her almost every night; but I was never " a dreamer of strange dreams," and had not thought it worth while to remember any of mine; for they were always eclipsed and turned into nothing by the vividness of my waking thoughts and imaginations. But one night I dreamt of her under very singular circumstances: and this is the only dream I have ever remembered, or thought worth the telling, though I never have told it till now ;—and but for the very peculiar manner in which it is connected with my present story, I should have left it untold for ever, remarkable as it is; for I have always considered that to relate a dream is one of the most tedious impertinencies of which a man, or even a woman, can be guilty. I dreamt that I had followed her home one Sunday evening, as usual, and that when she had gone in and the door was shut, I walked past the house, as I had frequently done at other times; but on this occasion, as I looked up at the door, which was at the top of three steps, I saw a name written upon it in large characters. When I awoke, this name was of course impressed on my memory; but at first I thought little or nothing of the circumstance-for I never had the slightest faith in dreams, omens, or the like. But presently I found that this name began to haunt me strangely, and in a way that I did not like; for it made me VOL. IV. No. 19.-1822. I feel that I was a little superstitious, while I prided myself on knowing that I was not so. I therefore determined to go and find out what her name really was, in order that I might not be pestered with this feeling, which I found to interfere with the quietness of my thoughts about her. Accordingly, a few nights after I had had this dream, I went to the street where she lived, to ascertain what I now wished to know. I was for some time at a loss how to set about my task; for I had a perfect horror of speaking to strangers, and still more of being the subject of remark and suspicion. After wandering about for some time, undecided what to do, I saw a boy coming from a neighbouring publichouse with beer and a lantern. (The reader must not be displeased at these apparently insignificant details. He is to remember that I am now relating a fact, for the absolute and literal truth of which I pledge myself, and the sole interest of which depends on its being a fact;-my taste, therefore, as well as my conscience, protest against any thing like alteration or embellishment.) I determined to begin my inquiries with this boy, and to ask him, as a leading question, whether a Mr. so and so (naming any name that might come into my head) lived in that street. Accordingly, when he came up to me, without thinking of it a moment beforehand, I almost involuntarily mentioned the name I had dreamt of having seen on the door; but just as indifferently as I should have mentioned any other, if any other than this had happened to come into my head first. I asked him if he could tell me whether Mr. Pt lived in that street? meaning to follow up this question by another to ascertain who lived at a certain number. The reader may conceive my surprise, but he cannot conceive my feelings, when the boy replied "Yes, he lives at No. -," mentioning that of her father's house. My knees trembled under me, a cold dew stood on my forehead like rain, and I could scarcely stand or move. You might have knocked me down with a feather, as the phrase is. The boy added, "But I suppose you mean Mr. P. -t," pronouncing the name differently from what I had done, and indicating that I had mistaken one letter of it for another.-And thus, in fact, it actually turned out to be!! I have related this story as it occurred, leaving the reader to make what he pleases or what he can of it. That it is literally true, I positively declare; but to account for it on either natural or supernatural grounds, is more than I pretend. It made a strong impression upon me at the time; but I soon came to think of it as a mere accidental coincidence. Since then, this latter has been the predominant inclination of my opinion on the point, but by no means the settled one; for whenever I am more than usually disposed to pamper and aggrandize my conception of the power of love, I am more than half tempted to regard the foregoing fact as a proof that that passion is capable of communicating a species of second-sight to the mind's eye, which enables it to discover, not more than exists, but more than is present to the mere bodily senses. With respect to the mistake which the dreaming senses seem to have made in their manner of transcribing the said name upon the tablet of my memory, it must be considered that the letters u and a are more easily mistaken for each other than almost any others in the alphabet; and that, in fact, half the similar errors (supposing this to have been one) which so disfigure and falsify Shakspeare, are attributable to the carelessness of his transcribers! I take leave of this singular incident by stating, for the benefit and satisfaction of those who may be disposed to regard it as something more than a mere accidental coincidence, that no previous associations could possibly have given rise to the circumstance, since I knew no one who was acquainted with the parties, and had never made a single previous inquiry on the subject. Little more remains to be told relative to this second act in the sentimental drama of my youth. The history of any one week is the history of the whole term of four years. Every Sunday I used to gaze myself into a fever of passion, which it required the tears of every night in the succeeding week to temper and cool. But these always had the desired effect; so that by the following Sunday I was sure to find myself ready to start afresh. To these regularly recurring intervals I attribute the long continuance of this singular intercourse. But, for these it would doubtless have taken a very different turn, and come to a very different end. If I could have gazed my fill whenever I pleased, I should probably soon have had the sense to discover the error of my ways, and should speedily have brought matters to a close, one way or the other. But these perpetual alternations of heat and cold, wet and dry-this exact "balance of power" (I have hated the phrase ever since I found out the mischief it worked me, or rather the good it probably deprived me of, in this affair) kept me for ever swinging backwards and forwards, like a well-hung pendulum. I was a perfect eight-day clock, wound up regularly every Sunday, to go through the week till the Saturday night following. Probably if I had missed a single Sunday's gazing, my love would have broken the spell on the one hand, by dying in its cradle for want of food; and if, on the other hand, it could have had a single day's extra gazing during any given week of the whole period, it might, perhaps, have gained strength to start up from its cradle, and assert its right; for I cannot doubt that, long before the end of the four years, it must have been able to speak and go alone, if it had been stimulated to try. But while this constant equilibrium was kept up, things bade fair to go on in the same way for ever; for, on my part, there was no reason whatever why they should either advance or retrograde. There was never a Sunday passed without our exchanging looks together; and here, where our intercourse began, there (as before) it ended. I never seemed to think that I was entitled to expect more, or to feel that I wanted more; and as I saw no prospect of my ever meeting with less, I was content, for want of knowing better, to go on as I was. The nearest approach to a personal communication that ever took place between this lady and me, was once that in going out of the meeting I found myself near enough to her to touch the hem of her garment. But it did not make me whole; on the contrary, I remember that it produced scarcely any particular effect on my feelings, either as they regarded her or myself. It is from the recollection of this fact I now judge that what I was loving, was, not a living creature, but the picture of one painted on the retina of my imagination by Memory, an artist accomplished in all things, except, like Sir Joshua, in the forming and mixing her colours; but they are so fugitive, that, in the case before us, I am convinced a single week passed without retouching the picture, would have caused it to fade away into nothing; while on the other hand, a single extra sitting might perhaps have endued it with breath and motion, and caused it to step from its canvass into life, after the fashion of that in " My Grandmother." Inow feel that, if this consummation had happened, all might still have been well; for it was not then too late. But now, if the best I can hope for is sometimes to dream that it did happen, at all events the worst I need fear is, to awake and find that it did not. We We have now done with these toys of youth. As "it is the eye of childhood fears a painted devil," so none but that can love a painted angel. Manhood cannot be content without either more, or less. have now done with mere impulses and feelings, and shall henceforth have to do with actions and passions-with thoughts and imaginations with hopes and fears. We have hitherto been floating on the calm surface of the stream, like the halcyon on its nest. We must now prepare to plunge, like Ladurlad, into the depths of the ocean of human life and I may venture to do so as fearlessly as he did-for, like him, I am gifted with a protecting curse, which shields me from all injuries but such as itself inflicts. May I not hope, too, that as, like Ladurlad, I am not conscious of having done any thing to deserve this curse, it may one day or other leave me suddenly and of itself, as his did?-Nay, more,-when "the fire in his heart, and the fire in his brain" had passed away, "Ladurlad sunk to rest. Blessed that sleep! more blessed was the waking! All whom he loved he met, to part no more.". And may it not be so with me? I will at least hope that it may-for 66 we cannot help our hopes"—as Juliana prettily says of her" dreams." At all events, I have made one step towards the consummation of those hopes for I have discovered the spot where exists all I have loved in others met in one. Whether I am to be blessed with the possession of this one, remains to be seen. All I can be sure of is, that, if my deserts are less than those of others who pretend to this possession, my wants are greater; all the foundation I see on which to build my hopes is the possibility that this sole well-spring of future good now left open to me, in determining through what channel it shall flow, and what happy land it shall fertilise, may THE ELOQUENCE OF EYES. Nor doth the eye itself, That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, SHAKSPEARE. THE origin of language is a puzzling point, of which no satisfactory solution has yet been offered. Children could not originally have compounded it, for they would always want intelligence to construct any thing so complicated and difficult; and as it is known that after a certain age the organs of speech, if they have not been called into play, lose their flexibility, it is contended that adults possessing the faculties to combine a new language would want the power to express it Divine inspiration is the only clue that presents itself in this emergency; and we are then driven upon the incredibility of supposing that celestial ears and organs could ever have been instrumental in originating the Low Dutch, in which language an assailant of Voltaire drew upon himself the memorable retort from the philosopher-" that he wished him more wit and fewer consonants." No one, however, seems to have contemplated the possibility that Nature never meant us to speak, any more than the Parrot to whom she has given similar powers of articulation; or to have speculated upon the extent of the substitute she has provided, supposing that man had never discovered the process of representing appetites, feelings, and ideas by sound. Grief, joy, anger, and some of the simple passions, express themselves by similar intelligible exclamations in all countries; these, therefore, may be considered as the whole primitive language of Nature; but if she had left the rest of her vocabulary to be conveyed by human features and gestures, man, by addressing himself to the eyes instead of the ears, would have still possessed a medium of communication nearly as specific as speech, with the great advantage of its being silent as the telegraph. Talking with his features instead of his tongue, he would not only save all the time lost in unravelling the subtleties of the grammarians from Priscian to Lily and Lindley Murray, but he would instantly become a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, and might travel" from old Belerium to the northern main" without needing an interpreter. We are not hastily to pronounce against the possibility of carrying this dumb eloquence to a certain point of perfection, for the experiment has never been fairly tried. We know that the exercise of cultivated reason and the arts of civilized life have eradicated many of our original instincts, and that the loss of any one sense invariably quickens the others; and we may therefore conjecture that many of the primitive conversational powers of our face have perished from disuse, while we may be certain that those which still remain would be prodigiously concentrated and exalted, did they form the sole medium by which our mind could develope itself. But we have no means of illustrating this notion, for the wild boys and men who have from time to time been caught in the woods, have been always solitaries, who, wanting the stimulus of communion, have never exercised their faculties; while the deaf and dumb born among ourselves, early instructed |