one of them happens to take root in the heart, there is no end to the destruction it works there like the Upas-tree of the East, it grows up, and spreading forth its poisonous branches, withers all things around it, blasting the soil that nourishes it, and making a desert of what might have been a garden of Eden! Thus it was with me, and thus it ever will be with all who attempt to play the logician with love. I saw this beautiful young creature, and, after basking for a little while in the sunshine of her looks, I felt my heart warm and expand into a new life; but this snake of a theory, that lay coiled up there while its resting-place remained cold, was also warmed into life at the same moment, and it stung both our hearts to death. I saw this lady, and I loved her;--I will even say that, as far as the mere sentiment was concerned, I loved her with a strength, a purity, and a simplicity that were not unworthy of her;-I loved her as she deserved to be loved. But this cursed theory about marriage had taken such firm root in my mind and heart, that I never for an instant thought of doing more than love her, or of wishing, or expecting, that she should do more than love me. I believed that she did love me, and was satisfied. I "sought to know no more." Nay, she did love me, as I learned afterwards, when she had been for four years the wife of another,―deeply, fondly, passionately loved me! (my blood seems turning into cold water as I write the words;)--she did love me; but either not understanding the theory on which I was acting, (as, how should she?) or not believing that I loved her as I ought, since I did not give her the only unequivocal proof of love that an honourable man can give to a virtuous woman, by seeking to make her wholly mine, she at length listened to the urgent instances of her friends, and consented that her hand should be contracted to another! A blank dismay comes over me again, now, while I think of this final bar, this death-blow to the hopes and aspirations of my youth, and shakes my heart even to its foundations. The recalling of this period disturbs me infinitely more than the circumstance itself did; for then, rage, fear, hope, anxiety, disappointment, and a thousand other contending feelings, divided me between them, and left little of me for any one of them to seize hold of to itself; while my wounded pride, erecting itself into a momentary supremacy, and seating itself on the throne of my heart, carried me triumphantly through all. Fool that I was!-much I had to be proud of, truly, when my precious wisdom (or consistency, as I remember I used to term it) had just lost me that, without which all the wisdom in the world is but foolishness, and all the consistency, contradiction!-and to dare to be proud, too, before HER, whose presence created the only pure thoughts and high imaginations I had ever experienced! This beggarly pride, which sustained me then, was soon, as it ought to be, levelled in the dust, never to rise from it again; and if an all-absorbing sorrow, lying like a dead weight at the bottom of my heart-if sorrow, penitence, and deep humility can atone for a folly that, in this case, amounted to a crime, since it involved the happiness of another, mine is now forgiven. When will the spirit that committed it be allowed to sink into its eternal sleep, and be at rest!

Before concluding this story, I would fain describe the lady who is the subject of it, as she was when I knew her; for, if I do not, the memory of her will soon be lost to a world that can ill afford to part

In fact, it is lost already,-for those who belonged to her then

never knew her at all, and those to whom she belongs now are not capable of distinguishing the difference between what she was and what she is. But I must not attempt the task, for both our sakes,-lest at the same time I renew what were best forgotten. And indeed I know no good that would be likely to come of it, for she is so changed now, that she would not know herself, even if I could paint her as she was; while for me she remains unchanged, since I choose never to see or think of her but through the medium of my imagination. Suffice it, that she was the chosen idol of a heart and mind smitten with the love of all that is good and beautiful in human nature, and finding it all centered in her; and that she looked like what she was: that she is the quiet and contented wife of an honest and good-natured husband, and the mother of his children; and that she looks like what she is!

I shall conclude this story at once, by copying the letter I wrote to her immediately on learning that she had consented to be the wife of another; and, in perusing it, the reader must bear in mind that, during the whole of our intercourse previous to this period, neither love nor marriage had ever for a moment been the subject of our talk; and also that our intimacy had been for a considerable time past broken off by her friends, who had good reason to believe that I had no thoughts of marrying, and who would not have been very ready to sanction my addresses, even if I had been disposed to present them in due form. For the rest, the letter must explain itself.

"To

"(I am totally at a loss by what title to address you. I cannot bring myself to write a chilling "Madam," and I must not write as I once ventured to do. I'll leave the place vacant. Pray fill it for me as you think I ought to have filled it.)

"Once more, and for the last time in my life, I am going to trouble you with what you will, I'm afraid, think does not concern you. After what I said to you when I saw you last, you will have guessed that I have been informed of your approaching marriage, and will, I suppose, have anticipated most of what I can have to say to you. I know, too, that, under these circumstances, it cannot but be unpleasant and troublesome to you to receive a letter from me at all. I would therefore have sought an opportunity of seeing you, and of saying the little I have to say to you; but I could not have spoken to you if I had; and if I could, I should not have dared to trust myself. Do not, however, fear that, by your indulgence in suffering me to write this once, you will incur the risk of being troubled so again. And, above all, pray do not suppose that I think you can have any desire to know any thing I can have to say to you. It must be a matter of the merest indifference to you. It is to exculpate myself, for myself, that I write, not to satisfy you,-it is because I desire that you should think I am not inconsistent with myself, in the strange way ("strange," in the common acceptation of the term) in which I am now going to act. I know that, in all that concerns you, I have hitherto acted, and am still going to act, as no one ever did before under similar circumstances. My past conduct towards you has been the result of a set of thoughts and feelings so entirely unlike the thoughts and feelings of those I hear and read of, and see about me, that, as it concerns merely myself, I shall not attempt to explain it. I am sure I should

not make myself understood: and I confess, when I think of the pain those feelings have cost me, and still more of that which is to come, I am sometimes inclined to attribute them to a false and overstrained refinement. But they have procured me happiness, too; and I would not part with the remembrance of a single hour of that, to get rid of all the pain and the pain itself I would not exchange for what others call pleasure. I feel that I am wandering from the subject on which I sat down to write; but I dread to approach it; and, besides, I cannot help recollecting that I am addressing you for the last time in my life. For three years I have been silent;-for a whole life to come I shall be silent ;it is perhaps excusable, then, if I indulge myself in, for once, saying more than is absolutely necessary. When I am about to close my eyes voluntarily, at once, and for ever, on that light which has been the guiding star of all the better part of my life-which has led me to all the little good I have been able to reach, and turned aside my footsteps from so much of evil which they would have otherwise fallen into, it is surely pardonable if I gaze upon it for a moment, more fixedly than ever-and even if I turn back now and then to look upon it once again that at least the remembrance of it may dwell with me after the reality is shut out for ever.

"In what I have farther to say to you, I hope you will not think I use language which you ought not to hear. I know that there is only one occasion on which the laws of society allow a man to use such language, or a woman to listen to it; and this is precisely the opposite of that occasion. But I have lately learned, as it respects myself, to disregard those laws; for the penalties attendant on breaking them have already, in your case, been undeservedly inflicted on me; and I am now beyond their reach. And if this were not so, no one could be injured by those penalties but myself-least of all, you. All that the strictest advocates for the observance of those laws could say to you, if they knew you had listened to such language from me, would be, You are about to become the wife of another. If the person who has used this language to you had chosen to keep his own counsel, he might still have been received by you as an acquaintance; but now he must of course be considered as a stranger.' My chief object in writing to you is, first, to account to you for my choosing voluntarily to incur this penalty; and then, to take leave of you for ever -you, to whom my life, that part of my existence which deserves the name of life, has been silently, but not the less fervently devoted-you, to whom, indirectly, I owe every thing I have acquired of good, every thing I have escaped of evil; to deserve and to possess whose esteem and society has been my one undivided hope to lose them, my one single fear. I know what you will say to all this: But why should you become a stranger to me? Why should you willingly give up that which you profess to value? Why should you not still continue what I have always considered you-a friend?' But it must not be. We do not understand each other in the use of the term: we never have-we never can. If I still continue to see you, it must be with real or apparent indifference. I must either change all my feelings to you, or disguise them. I cannot do the one, and I scorn to do the other: I never have done it. The confession I have now been making cannot be new to you. If I had thought it would be so, I should not have

made it and yet, if it is not new to you, what am I to think of some of your past conduct towards me? I have for seven years of my life done little else but study the female character. I have had more and better opportunities of doing so than most; and I think I am intimately acquainted with it: I cannot for a moment suspect you of having trifled with me-and yet but I do not dare even to think of this part of the past now: when I do, it mingles itself with the present, and confuses together remembrances, and fancies, and hopes, till I know not which is truth, which illusion. Over and over again I entreat you to pardon me if I say any thing that is unpleasant to you to hear, or if I wander from the subject on which I profess to be writing. But I feel myself almost as unable to write to you with any collectedness, as I am to speak to you. In one word, the chief that I have to say is this: I cannot see you with feelings at all approaching to indifference, and therefore I must not see you at all. Nothing, then, remains for me to do, but to take leave of you-and in what terms am I to do this? I repeat, the confession I have been making must have been known to you before, and you must at the same time have contemplated the state of things which I have told you I understand to exist at present, and which induces me to make this confession in plain words; and yet, when I said, the other day, that I should probably not see you again, you seemed quite surprised. What appeared to me to be a matter of course when I heard of what I have alluded to, appeared to come upon you as a thing you had never thought of or expected. I am totally at a loss to account for this; when I attempt to think of it, I forget the present, and hopes and wishes (idle and senseless ones, I confess, and for which, perhaps, I deserve to suffer) come crowding upon me, and blend themselves with recollections of the past and anticipations of the future, and for a moment cover every thing with sunshine: but the next moment, the present returns, and all becomes confused and dark. I dare not say more. I now take my leave of you. But do not suppose I have made any senseless and romantic vows and resolutions never to see you again, and so forth. I am too sensible of my own weakness ever to make a resolution on any subject, however trifling; much less on important ones. I shall abstain from seeking to see you; simply because it is the conviction of my reason that this will be the properest plan for me, and the most convenient one for you. If it were in my power, I would immediately leave England; because then, and then only, I could be sure of myself. But I do not live for myself alone; and besides, I have not any present means of living away from here. If, then, while I am compelled to remain here, chance should throw me in your way, I cannot anticipate how I shall act. There are points on which I am the weakest of human beings. You know this: do not, then, judge harshly of me, if I should not act as you may expect, or think I ought to do. It is difficult enough to know what ought to be done; but always to do it, is not in human nature. Once for all, adieu.

"One word more, and I have done. When I asked if I might write to you, you said, if I did, I must not expect you to answer me. I confess this determining beforehand that you could have nothing to answer to any thing that I could have to say, was what I did not expect. However, I told you that what I had to say did not require any

answer. So far as I know, it does not: if you should think so too, THAT will be the fullest answer you can give me; it will speak volumes. Among other things, it will, perhaps, make me look upon the future with indifference. But even that will never make me cease to look with delight upon the past. It will never make me forget the I once knew. It will even render still more pure and sacred my feelings towards her, by teaching me to fancy that she has ceased to exist."

Alas! when she ceased to love me, she did cease to exist-for mefor all the world-and, most of all, for herself! And when I ceased to love her, (which, contrary to the anticipation with which the above letter closes, I did the moment she had made herself the property of another), love itself ceased to exist for me: it became a name, a belief, an imagination-worst of all, a theory.

But there is one hope that still keeps my heart alive, in the midst of its desolation. If the soul is immortal, its affections are immortal too, and may be re-created, and raised even from the tomb where they have long lain buried. There is one person still in the world capable of bringing about this resurrection; and I have at least faith to believe in the possibility of it, and patience to wait for its consummation. A little while will determine my fate. In the mean time I abandon my intention of continuing these Confessions, and finally close them here. Z.

SOCIAL GRIEVANCES.

I AM not going to write about any of those grievances which we encounter in the streets of London, the authors of which are menaced with "the utmost rigour of the law," and which the laws do sometimes visit with very extraordinary rigour ; but about some of those moral grievances that infest society, and for the authors of which no adequate punishment has yet been invented. In this age of legislation and improvement, when every one has a nostrum and a panacea, and every boysenator tries his "'prentice hand" on the constitution of the state and the institutions of the country, it is quite surprising that no philanthropist has drawn up a code criminel, by which some of the trespassers on social rights and the disturbers of social enjoyment may be brought to condign punishment. If any one, like myself, have the misfortune, for a misfortune sad experience shews it to be, to have a decent library and habits of retirement and study, he will know what it is to see some "damned good-natured friend" calling in upon him in the midst of his pursuits, pestering him with unmeaning chatter, pulling down one book after another, with some insipid remark on each; putting a question about one thing, and without waiting for a reply starting off to another subject; inquiring kindly after your health and your studies, and with a knowing leer hinting that he knows you are the author of an article in the last New Monthly; and "how was your tiff with Miss tled?" and a deal of this "skimble skamble stuff," which is not valuable for its matter, and yet you cannot quarrel with him, because he has no intention to offend, and no notion that he is a bore. This sort of person is a grievance; and you cannot turn him out of the room, as it would be impolite; nor is there any method that I am aware of by which such an evil may be avoided.

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