Page:Landoniana.pdf/7

Rh

evils make the worst part of great ones: it is so much easier to endure misfortune than to bear an inconvenience. Captain Franklin, half frozen on the Arctic shores, would not grumble one tithe so much as an elderly gentleman sitting in a draught.

Strange is it that people (unless in the way of ostentation) never value the blessings they possess. But if life has a happiness over which the primeval curse has passed and harmed not, it is the early and long-enduring affection of blood and habit. The passion which concentrates its strength and beauty upon one, is a rich and terrible stake, the end whereof is death;—the living light of existence is burnt out in an hour—and what remains? The dust and the darkness. But the love which is born in childhood—an instinct deepening into a principle—retains to the end something of the freshness belonging to the hour of its birth: the amusement partaken—the trifling quarrel made up—the sorrows shared together—the punishment in which all were involved—the plans for the future, so fairy-tale-like and so false, in which all indulged: so true it is that love's slightest links are its strongest!

There is something inexpressibly touching in the story of Ishmael, the youth who was sent into the wilderness of life with his bow and his arrow, 'his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him.' Even in our crowded, busy, and social world, on how many is this doom pronounced! What love makes allowances like household love?—what takes an interest in small sorrows and small successes like household love?—God forgive those (and I would not even say forgive, were not Divine mercy illimitable,) who turn the household altar to a place of strife! Domestic dissension is the sacrilege of the heart.

Believing, as I do, that falling in love goes by destiny, and that, of all affairs, those of the heart are those