“Listen to me. I won’t make your flesh creep, for unanswerable reasons. I don’t even think I shall freeze the marrow in your bones. I could tell you some strange stories, but I dare say your own experiences are more remarkable than mine. I will only ask you to reflect on the amount of suffering that came under our daily notice when we lived in the world, and say whether every pang of mind or body, every tear shed or swallowed down, every groan indulged or repressed, were anything but sheer waste? Can you not recall a hundred instances of strength sapped by drink, of intellect warped by madness, of beauty fading under neglect, or withered by disappointment? Here a pair of lives are wasted because they must needs run out their course in different grooves—there two more are utterly thrown away, because, encompassed in a golden link, they can by no means shake themselves free. The fairest of all, it may be, and the most promising, never blooms into perfection for want of its congenial comrade (wasted too, perhaps, at the antipodes), and failing thus to reach maturity, dwindles, dwarfed and unmated, to the grave. Think of Beauty wasted on the Beast—the Beast, too, utterly out of his element, that he must roll on the garden sward rather than labour in the teeming furrow. Look at Hercules spell-bound in the lap of Omphale, broad-fronted Antony enervated by black-browed Cleopatra. Consider the many Messrs. Caudle who lavish as much good-humour as would set up a dozen households on their legal nightmares, and do not forget poor Miss Prettyman pining in lonely spinsterhood over the way. See the mother training up her child, impressing on him, far more forcibly than she feels them for herself, lessons of honour, truth, probity, and the unspeakable blessing of faith—praying her heart out for that wilful little urchin, night and morning on her knees. A good Christian with humble hopes of heaven, does she know that, far more lavishly than those heathen termagants in hell, she is pouring water in a sieve? Does she know she may live to see that smooth, soft, wondering brow scored deep with sorrow, or lowering black with sin—that round rosy cheek hollowed by depravity, or bloated with excess? Worst of all, the merry, guileless heart embittered by falsehood, and hardened with ill-usage till it has ceased to feel for others, even for itself! Great Heaven! have we not seen them—these simple, honest, manly hearts, taken by some soft-eyed demon with loving ways, and sweet angelic smile, to be kept carefully, to be watched jealously, till their fabric has been thoroughly studied, then broken deftly and delicately, yet with such nice art that they can never mend again, and so, politely ‘Returned, with thanks’? “Forgive me: on such anatomical outrages I have no right to expect you should feel so warmly as myself.