'Tis well:--at least I shall not know How time or tears may change that brow; Thine eyes shall smile, thy cheek shall glow To me in distant years as now. And when in holier worlds, where Blame, And Blight, and Sorrow, have no birth, Thou'rt mine at last--I'll clasp the same Unalter'd Angel, loved on earth. MAN IS A FEATHERLESS BIPED. I have heard--I saw yesterday that fact enlarged upon in Mrs Thunder's _Tales of Passion_--that people's hair may be turned gray by intense anxiety, intense fear, intensity of any kind, in a single day. My hair is not exactly gray (far from it, indeed, considering my time of life)--but, if the above physical phenomenon did ever really occur, it ought to be silvery-white. For I have passed through a day, the consequences of which colour, and will colour, my whole existence. Life's fever came to a crisis, and the crisis turned out unfavourably. The threads of my destiny got into a tangle, and Fate in a passion cut the knot with her scissors. My earthly career has been divided into two distinctly-marked portions, and the point where the two are united--the bending-stone (as the Greeks say) of the race-course, is the day on which I was _plucked_. Reader of Maga, as your experiences are possibly confined to the land of Maga's nativity, I will explain to you what it is to be plucked. It is to have your degree refused at one of the English universities. Now don't suppose that, when I have said this, I have said all. The mischief does not end with the refusal. It is bad enough, truly, to have gone through three years of reading and walking, or of port-wine drinking and tandem-driving, and then to get nothing for your trouble. But that's not it. A plucking brings with it consequences quite peculiar to itself--consequences hardly intelligible out of England--hardly intelligible, indeed, out of the sphere of the upper classes in England. The English universities are the nurseries of adolescent English gentlemen--of the whole aristocracy, church, and bar. And the many thousand persons comprised in these very extensive denominations, although they may have nothing else in common, agree in fond and not very discriminating reverence for Oxford and Cambridge. I really believe that many a man, whose actual reminiscences of these seats of learning are confined to the pace of the boats and the badness and dearness of the wine, yet manages to persuade himself that his being was somehow exalted by his three years' course. And then the sacredness which attaches to their verdict! A fellow will pass current any where with the university stamp upon him. I _know_ that Muggleton, who got a medal, and is the slowest dummy in creation, used to be invited occasionally to dinner-parties as a substitute for the late S. S. Besides, university life is common ground to half the world. You place Tories and Whigs, high churchmen and low churchmen, round the